Rails 4 Update Data Through View Page - ruby-on-rails

Question

I currently have a view page named "users". In my view page, I'm displaying a table with attributes pulled from the users table such as the first name, last name, last login, admin, etc... In the admin field, it displays from the users table true or false.
What I would like to accomplish is to create a drop down, that displays the user's current value for admin (true or false), and then be able to change this attribute from the view page. Currently, I'm having to use the console on the server to manually change a user's value to true or false to grant or revoke admin privileges. Needless to say, this is inconvenient. I'm still fairly new to Rails and have been using scaffolds up to this point. I'm not sure how to accomplish this, and any advise would be greatly appreciated!
Users schema:
create_table "users", force: true do |t|
t.string "email", default: "", null: false
t.string "encrypted_password", default: "", null: false
t.string "reset_password_token"
t.datetime "reset_password_sent_at"
t.datetime "remember_created_at"
t.integer "sign_in_count", default: 0, null: false
t.datetime "current_sign_in_at"
t.datetime "last_sign_in_at"
t.string "current_sign_in_ip"
t.string "last_sign_in_ip"
t.datetime "created_at"
t.datetime "updated_at"
t.boolean "admin", default: false
t.string "first_name"
t.string "last_name"
end
Admin controller:
class AdminController < ApplicationController
before_action :authenticate_user!
def users
#users = User.all.order('last_name ASC')
end
def reports
end
end
Users view page:
<table class="table table-hover table-condensed">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Last Name</th>
<th>First Name</th>
<th>Email</th>
<th>Creation Date</th>
<th>Last Sign In</th>
<th>IP Address</th>
<th>Admin</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<% #users.each do |user| %>
<tr>
<td><%= user.last_name %></td>
<td><%= user.first_name %></td>
<td><%= user.email %></td>
<td><%= user.created_at.strftime("%-m/%-d/%y") %></td>
<td><%= user.current_sign_in_at.strftime("%-m/%-d/%y") %></td>
<td><%= user.current_sign_in_ip %></td>
<td><%= user.admin %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>
</tbody>
</table>

Answer 1

You could accomplish this in a couple of different ways. For example, you could let the link in the drop-down trigger a method toggle_admin for removing admin if user is admin or the reverse if that's the case.
First create the route, in routes.rb:
resource :users do
get :toggle_admin
end
in your view:
<%=link_to (#current_user.admin ? 'Remove admin' : 'Make admin'), toggle_admin_users_path %>
And in your controller, you could have something like this:
def toggle_admin
#current_user.update_attribute :admin, (#current_user.admin ? false : true)
end
Hmm... yeah, I don't know. Could work. As you can see, I assume here that you have a #current_user variable for picking up the relevant user, otherwise send in the user.id into these methods, either from the url params or directly into the controller method.

Answer 2

First you'll need a route and a corresponding controller action that handles the update.
In a RESTful way this would be in routes.rb: resources :users, only: [:update]
In your view you need a from, that sends the data to the controller:
<%= form_for user do %>
...
Each of the users in the #users.each should have it's own form and a submit button. To create the select (that's the dropdown with true/false value) use the Rails form helper.
The controller action could look something like this:
def update
user = User.find(params[:id])
user.update_attributes(user_params)
end
private
def user_params
params.require(:user).permit(:admin)
end