Add and html id to the flash messages (Feature #677)

Thanks for your patch. We will review it soon for inclusion.

As a small sidenote, I'd like to ask you to not assign issues to people yourself though. We use the assignment to track who of the core people works on an issue. Because of that, people generally assign issue to themselves if they start working on it to prevent useless double-work as well as to make sure we don't miss issues.

+1 on the feature idea, -1 on this patch.

While this code might work, it won't work for your origional purpose: updating the flash messages from ajax. I've done this in plugins to let me explain.

When the page is loaded, render_flash_messages is run which creates divs for each of the current flash messages (important). They get the CSS class and an id.

But if there isn't any current flash messages, then no divs are created. Thus, if the page loads successfully then there will be no flash divs rendered to the page and your Ajax won't be able to update anything at all. In other words, the DOM won't have the elements unless those specific flash types were sent on the page load already.

The good news is that I already have a work around for this. Instead of only showing the flash divs when they are used, we should show them on every page and hide them if they are empty (display:none has worked the best). That way they are always there and you can always update them. For example in jquery:

1jQuery('#flashError').html('There was an error...').show();

I'm setting this issue back to Open so it can be addressed this way. I might be able to create a patch for it after I finish the major design change (#263).