In the last guide we implemented Growl notifications, but it did not work for all of the form validations. In this guide we are going to fix that.

Open the _form.html.erb partial and insert some debugging code in the second line, like this:

<!-- app/views/posts/_form.html.erb -->

<%= @post.errors.inspect %>

Start the rails server and open your browser. When you try to create a post, you'll get this message:

It says that the date and rationale fields cannot be empty. To have this message displayed as a Growl notification we need integrate our alert call into our form.

<!-- app/views/posts/_form.html.erb -->

<%= form_for @post, class: "form-horizontal" do |f| %>
  <%= @post.errors.inspect %>

  <% @post.errors.each do |error| %>
    <%= js add_gritter(error, title: "Overtime App Notification", sticky: false) %>
  <% end %>

This may seem like it will work, however we're making a few mistakes here that are important to understand. When you refresh the page, and save without entering the values, it throws an error.

The two problems here are:

1. We need to first check to see if there are errors. If we attempt to loop over a set of messages that don't exist the page is always going to throw an error.
2. Next, we need to loop over the full_messages method call provided by Devise, not the error objects themselves.

In order to get this working let's update the code as follows:

<!-- app/views/posts/_form.html.erb -->

<%= form_for @post, class: "form-horizontal" do |f| %>

  <% if @post.errors.any? %>
    <% @post.errors.full_messages.each do |error| %>
      <%= js add_gritter(error, title: "Overtime App Notification", sticky: false) %>
    <% end %>
  <% end %>

If you refresh the browser you'll see that now the system is showing the notifications properly.

Resources

• Code at this stage