Redirect with message

[eluser]headdy[/eluser]
I havne't been able to solve this one yet.

Basically after editing and validating an item, I want to jump to the main page and display a "success" messasge, wth the URL of the main page.
I'm using an extended controller with a $messages array.

So far I've tried redirect(), and calling the index method of the controller. The first way solves the URL issue but doesn't preserve the data; the second works, except the URL is that of the edit page.

Any idea how to solve this?