Backend administration in Ruby on Rails

Question

I'd like to build a real quick and dirty administrative backend for a Ruby on Rails application I have been attached to at the last minute. I've looked at activescaffold and streamlined and think they are both very attractive and they should be simple to get running, but I don't quite understand how to set up either one as a backend administration page. They seem designed to work like standard Ruby on Rails generators/scaffolds for creating visible front ends with model-view-controller-table name correspondence.

How do you create a admin_players interface when players is already in use and you want to avoid, as much as possible, affecting any of its related files?

The show, edit and index of the original resource are not usuable for the administrator.

Answer 1

I think namespaces is the solution to the problem you have here:

map.namespace :admin do |admin|
    admin.resources :customers
end

Which will create routes admin_customers, new_admin_customers, etc.

Then inside the app/controller directory you can have an admin directory. Inside your admin directory, create an admin controller:

./script/generate rspec_controller admin/admin

class Admin::AdminController < ApplicationController

  layout "admin"
  before_filter :login_required
end

Then create an admin customers controller:

./script/generate rspec_controller admin/customers

And make this inhert from your ApplicationController:

class Admin::CustomersController < Admin::AdminController

This will look for views in app/views/admin/customers and will expect a layout in app/views/layouts/admin.html.erb.

You can then use whichever plugin or code you like to actually do your administration, streamline, ActiveScaffold, whatever personally I like to use resourcecs_controller, as it saves you a lot of time if you use a REST style architecture, and forcing yourself down that route can save a lot of time elsewhere. Though if you inherited the application that's a moot point by now.

Answer 2

Do check out active_admin at https://github.com/gregbell/active_admin.

Answer 3

I have used Streamlined pretty extensively.

To get Streamline working you create your own controllers - so you can actually run it completely apart from the rest of your application, and you can even run it in a separate 'admin' folder and namespace that can be secured with .

Here is the Customers controller from a recent app:

class CustomersController < ApplicationController
  layout 'streamlined'
  acts_as_streamlined       

  Streamlined.ui_for(Customer) do
    exporters :csv   
    new_submit_button :ajax => false 
    default_order_options :order => "created_at desc"   
    list_columns :name, :email, :mobile, :comments, :action_required_yes_no  
  end
end

Answer 4

Use https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin.