ruby on rails - Flash message in redirect not working

Question

I have the following in my controller:

redirect_to signin_path, :notice => "The email is already registered"

In my view I have

<%= flash[:notice] if flash[:notice] %>

But the flash message does not appear.

However if I do the following in the controller

flash[:notice] = "There is already an acount for this email. Please Login to create your board."
redirect_to signin_path

It does work. What is the reason the first one does not work?

Answer 1

Do some tail'ing on your logs and see if you're being redirected to multiple actions before you render. If you are, it's likely that flash isn't being kept long enough to make it to the view where it is finally rendered.

A well-placed flash.keep(:notice) should do the trick.

Much later edit: Also, in retrospect, if you're redirecting that many times, I highly suggest you do some refactoring and eliminate any unnecessary jumps by consolidating your redirect logic at a higher level, so that your redirects are predetermined and only happen once, twice max.