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.

score 53 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 20 '14 at 06:53

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.

a couple things you should add to this answer to help us rails n00bs: mention that the first code block is located in routes.rb and also mention that you need to install rspec and rspec-rails gems in order to generate an rspec_controller. — aarona, Dec 04 '09 at 10:53
Dear Laurie Young, could you rewrite your example for the Rails 3? — Kir, Mar 07 '11 at 20:12

score 6 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 20 '14 at 07:13

6

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

edited Jul 20 '14 at 07:13

Peter Mortensen

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answered May 23 '11 at 13:59

phoet

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Toby Hede · Answer 3 · 2008-09-20T09:43:46.470

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

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 09 '11 at 04:10

1

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

answered Feb 09 '11 at 04:10

rafamvc

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Backend administration in Ruby on Rails

4 Answers4

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