the.railsi.st is Patrick Crowley.

I'm a Ruby developer and this blog is a record of my experiences using Ruby on Rails to build web apps.

I also run SD Ruby, a local Ruby group in San Diego known for its podcast.

While working on a Flash developers page for the Chumby website, I kept getting this error:

Error in DevelopersController#flash

You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
The error occured while evaluating nil.sweep

Pretty puzzling at first. The method was empty, so what could be wrong here?

class DevelopersController < ApplicationController

  def flash
  end

end

Eventually... it hit me! ActionController has its own flash method which is used to display flash notices and warnings.

But, in this case, I was making a page about Adobe Flash, so I was running over a reserved word for controller method names. Kinda obvious, once you think about it.

What's the workaround? Well... if you really need your page to be named "flash" (and I did), just remove the method from your controller. As long as you have a template named flash.rhtml, the page will still load.