Error Messages For

A Rails plugin that extends the functionality and customization of Rails Auto-Generated Errors when calling error_messages_for().

Five new parameters have been added.

:priority – An array of model attributes. Attributes with errors specified in the array will display first. Attributes with errors not in the array will be displayed in random order after the prioritized attributes.

:attr_names – A hash of attr_name => ‘Display Name’ mappings. The default humanizing of attribute names in Rails models will remove underscores and capitalize the first word. This isn’t always adequate. By specifying display names, you can customize your error displays to be more ‘english’ like. You can also specify complete errors by using the :defaults boolean attribute described next.

:defaults – True or False. Used in conjunction with :attr_names, you can override the default error messages on a per-attribute basis, but still validate many attributes with one declaration. An example, right now in Rails, you must validate each attribute independently if you want to customize the error messages for each attribute (even though the validation is the same). Now you can pass all your attributes to the validation routines and control your error messages where they belong, in the view.

:header – A string to override the header text of the error container. It will perform substitutions for the error count and model name. Using a simple syntax of {count} and {object}.

:sub_header – A string to override the sub header in the error container.

USAGE

To prioritize your errors display: <%= error_messages_for(‘object’, :priority => [‘column_name_1’, ‘column_name_2’] %>

Or for multiple models: <%= error_messages_for([‘object1’, ‘object2’], :priority => [‘column_name_1’, ‘column_name_2’] %>

To override the auto-generated column names: <%= error_messages_for(‘object’, :attr_names => {‘column_name_1’ => ‘The First Column’, ‘column_name_2’ => ‘The Second Column’} ) %>

To override the default error messages by column:

models/person.rb

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base

validates_presence_of :column_name_1, :column_name_2, ...

end

views/people/new.rhtml

<%= error_messages_for(‘person’, :attr_names => {‘column_name_1’ => ‘The First Column cannot be empty.’, ‘column_name_2’ => ‘The Second Column has to be filled in to.’}, :defaults => false, :header => ‘You need to correct {count} error(s) before we can save this {object}’, :sub_header => ‘The following fields had bad data input’ ) %>