Chris Olsen

8 errors prohibited this account from being saved
There were problems with the following fields:
…

Maybe it is just me, but having error messages like the above seems a little to artificial to me. Maybe rails has standard error messages like the following so everybody changes them, who knows.

One thing I found when searching for customized error formatters is that they would only accept one model object reference, ie, they would only allow for

error_messages_for(:account)

and not

error_messages_for(:account, :user)

which is odd seeing as the overridden method does allow for many models.

Below is a custom method that will allow us to deliver the message with more of a person to person flavour.

def error_messages_for(*object_names)
  messages = []
  object_names.each do |object_name|
    object = instance_variable_get("@#{object_name}")
    if object && !object.errors.empty?      
      object.errors.full_messages.each do |message| 
        messages << %(<li>#{message}</li>) unless message =~ /is invalid/
      end
    end
  end
 
  if messages.size > 0
    content_tag(:div, 
    content_tag(:h2, "Uh-oh! We have some invalid fields.") +
    content_tag(:ul, messages),:id => 'errors')
  end
end

It will also prevent messages like “Users is invalid” (yes that is pluralized on purpose) that occur from having the validates_associated :user validator telling us that the associated model is invalid.

This isn’t groundbreaking, but I know I will be searching for this again sometime soon.