remove global messages not working

Question

I need to remove global messages. I did put following to local.xml

<remove name="global_messages" />
<remove name="messages" />

but messages still appear. I also tried to comment out following lines in page.xml

<block type="core/messages" name="global_messages" as="global_messages"/>
<block type="core/messages" name="messages" as="messages"/>

which also did not work. Notice messages still appear. Where are the messages still coming from if commented out in page.xml? and Yes, I did flush Magento cash.

Answer 1

It doesn't work because... For example in the product view page this template is rendered: catalog/product/view.phtml. This template contains at the top this line:

<?php echo $this->getMessagesBlock()->getGroupedHtml() ?>

And $this->getMessagesBlock() is defined in Mage_Core_Block_Abstract and it looks like this:

    public function getMessagesBlock()
    {
        if (is_null($this->_messagesBlock)) {
            return $this->getLayout()->getMessagesBlock();
        }
        return $this->_messagesBlock;
    }

This means that it calls: Mage_Core_Model_Layout::getMessagesBlock();

This last method is

    public function getMessagesBlock()
    {
        $block = $this->getBlock('messages');
        if ($block) {
            return $block;
        }
        return $this->createBlock('core/messages', 'messages');
    }

This means that if a block with the name 'messages' is not found in the layout is created and returned.

I see 2 possible solutions here:

1. Edit all the template files and remove <?php echo $this->getMessagesBlock()->getGroupedHtml() ?>. But I wouldn't take this road. It's to much time consuming and you might miss something.
2. Override "magento style" the method: Mage_Core_Block_Messages::getGroupedHtml() to return an empty string.

First I thought of overriding Mage_Core_Model_Layout::getMessagesBlock() to return nothing if the block is not in layout, but you will get errors when calling ->getGroupedHtml() on a non object.

but you can try overriding Mage_Core_Model_Layout::getMessagesBlock() to return a simple core/template block that does not have a method getGroupedHtml() method and will return null when called. (this would be the third solution.)

Answer 2

Or you can add in XML unused block like

<block type="core/messages" name="grab_messages" />

before old blocks. Because first exemplar of core/messages block grab all messages and clear messages from session.