I haven’t been able to find anything built into Rails to present errors from model validation when a request is sent via AJAX.

So I came up with this handly little hack, which I’ve put in my application.rb file.

def render_javascript_alert_for_errors_on(object)
  errors = object.errors.full_messages
  alert_text = errors.collect { |error| '-' + error }.join("\n")
  render :update do |page|
    page.alert alert_text
  end
end

This takes the object and displays a nicely-formatted version of all the errors on that object, taking advantage of inline RJS to render the javascript to create an alert().

It works perfectly, but it still feels a little “hacky” to me. Any better ideas?