I am new to rails and I am currently in the process of developing a check list app. I would greatly appreciate some guidance as I am currently suck in my development process and would just like some help getting me on my way.
The project I am aiming to achieve is as follows:
User has a homepage, user can add collections to watch. User can then toggle (have/don't have) products within that collection. User has no privileges to edit content of the collections or projects, all the user has access too is simply saying if they have the product or not.
Users homepage will consist of a listing of all their collections, and under their collections will be the products that correlates.
Where I am in my development:
Currently I have a 1 to many association with, Collections -> Products. I have taken care of the CRUD for collections, as well as the associated CRUD for products. I have generated a devise user model to provide myself with an easy sign in/sign up functionality.
My next steps?
That's why I'm here. I would like some guidance before I dive into further development as I don't want to drift off track. I'm not looking for specific code snippets or generators, I am basically looking for some verification that I am on the right track and perhaps some steps to help me on my way to the next bit of functionality.
If you would like to see my current code it can be found here:
https://github.com/gogogarrett/Blind-Boxd
Thanks in advance,
Garrett
It sounds like you are on the right path.
I would suggest doing the following in loosely the following order:
Make sure your models contain the right fields and types of fields for your app
Setup associations and make they are working
Go through each view and make sure the flow is correct i.e. right forms, links are displayed and data is processed correctly
Figure out how you want each page to be laid out and what's best for usability
Add some styling and polish
Throughout the whole process: write tests and use the console
Hope this helps.
Related
I've been following this tutorial on creating a backend administration section for a rails 3 app.
I like the way it works, but the developer is required to manually generate namespaced controllers and models for each resource they want to administer in the backend.
RailsAdmin, in contrast, does not require you to do this, instead it detects which models you have in your app, and sets up admin sections for each one, without you having to generate any extra code.
Are there any resources out there, where I can learn to make my admin section work a little bit more like RailsAdmin? (I tried reading the RailsAdmin codebase but I get lost as there's quite a lot going on).
Ideally, I'd like my admin section to detect my application's models, and magically create admin pages for each one depending on that model's attributes. I'm certainly not asking anyone to write my code here, just looking for some tips on where to go in order to find out more about this sort of metaprogramming.
I've been thinking of writing my own backend, because I feel active_admin might not support all the requirements.
I wanted to ask if Active_Admin supports any of these just to be sure:
I have a has_and_belongs_to_many relationship between my ad model
and tag model. In the new ad page I would like to have the form for
the ads, as well as all available tags so the admin can choose which
tags to associate with the ad. I was able to do that normally in my
application, but can I do that with active_admin?
Can I add custom buttons.. Like one to convert to PDF for example,
or one to send an e-mail..
Could I add some sort of before_filter, so the admin can only view a
model, but not edit or delete it for example?
Thank you.
All of those things can be done via Active Admin, but as it was pointed out, it can be quite a nightmare actually implementing certain things depending on the amount of flexibility you need it to have. For that exact reason, I decided to start rolling my own administration panels.
I have tried an implemented almost all robust gems for admin panels. I have also sweated over several hand-made ones.
Active-Admin is very usability centred, but it is not configuration centred.
As you rightly aniticipated, some of the more complex modifications can be tedious.
In my experience, rails_admin is the best middle ground I could find.
Take a look at it, it is highly functional, completely modular (made as a Rails 3 Engine) and simpler to modify.
If you can live without some details when customizing this is definitely the way to go. However, if you need to have everything just right, then there is not substitute for hand-made.
I'm learning RoR, I've read some tutorials (railstutorial for the first one),
but I've a problem to define the logic layout of the my first simple website.
The structure is:
When you go to mysite.com you see a welcome page with the signup form or the link for login.
If you signup or you login into the site, you are at mysite.com/dashboard and you see a list of your messages.
You can go to mysite.com/$username and you see a page with a form where you can write a message for the $username.
Stop. That's it. It's very simple, I know, but is for learning.
The problem is this: I'm new to MVC paradigm and I don't know how structure the logic layout of my app. Of course there'll two models: User and Message. But for controllers? And which functions in any controllers? Should I use scaffolding?
Please give me a help, I'm very confused.
Thank you.
Controllers are the logic for the data, so to login/sign-up is really validating/creating a user, if you need to view the users dash board, well that's a look up on the user data so he goes there as well.
The messages, that will be a separate controller that can create/view messages!
As others have pointed out, your controllers contain the logic for your code and invoke views based on that logic by rendering or redirecting to pages. You can define whatever actions you want in your controllers, and then use routes to map a particular URL to a controller action. That being said, Rails gets a lot easier if you "go with the flow" and make some simple assumptions about the actions that could happen. Both your users and your messages represent rows in their respective database tables. There's no much you can do to a row in a database table - you can Create it, Read it, Update it, or Delete it (CRUD). If you define your actions in terms of these four logical actions, Rails lets you generate some easy routes.
You can back into any URL schema that you want, but what you are describing is:
Read the messages that are for a user on the dashboard
Create a message for a user when you go to another page (mysite/username)
Each of these maps to a CRUD action that you should be defining in your controllers.
Agreed also with other advice to simply do a few more tutorials that will probably clear this up.
If you haven't already, read Getting Started with Rails. Look out for the discussion on MVC and scaffolding. Playing around with scaffolding can help you learn where things go and is a great place to start for beginners.
Also, I highly recommend this book: Agile Web Development with Rails. It is very hands on and an easy read.
I'm taking a "cloud computing" course and have a few problems that I am trying to work through for the final project. I'll preface this with saying that i know nothing about this subject, and the few powerpoints I got off my online class don't really seem to point me in the right direction.
Basically what i need to do is have a page that allows a user to create a evaluation form. I have a general idea how to do it but I don't even know where to start in rails, I was hoping there was some stuff that Rails would do for me that might make it easier.
My assumption is that I could create a form that would allow entries for section headings.
Then when one occurs I need to allow actual question entries. then the user has the option of adding questions for the section. Then the user may add another heading, and questions.
When this "process" is complete, I need to allow a 2nd user to actually use the form for entries.
I'm assuming I somehow need to make a "string' object that will hold the text that I'm setting up, and then it sets up entries for each question.
I'm clueless where to start, I'll probably be asking a lot of questions. I don't want the solution I just need to get pointers, heading in the right direction.
the first step I'm thinking is finding a way to allow a "command" to do the equivalent of this but in the browser from another form:
rails generate scaffold Evaluation Topic:string rating:string comments:string
Is there a way to "create" a scaffold of a form using rails in a web browser?
It seems to me that you are mostly concerned with created forms using Rails.
Railscasts has some awesome tutorials on forms: Railscasts
After viewing some of those, you should see that Rails follows an MVC policy (more information here).
Since you mentioned the scaffold, it creates several controller actions. One of those is "new" (also "edit") which I believe would be the equivalent of creating the evaluation form.
You could then create a controller action(s) for users to fill out the evaluation form.
These links should clear up a few of your questions and get you used to the rails terminology for better questions later.
Good Luck!
So I've decided after much debate and research to use symfony on my next project. To sum the project up, it is an LMS (Yes, I know there are pre-built ones such as moodle but they do not have what my particular company requires). There are many modules and issues to take into consideration. My question is in what order should one start with Symfony?
Note, the database is already made and populated with data.
The Doctrine ORM?
User Authentication?
Creating the Core modules? (Courses, Enrollment, Grades)
Page security (i.e. installing the rules for who can access what page)?
Checking out the Jobeet tutorial is good advice.
If the database is already built, I would probably do something like this:
Ensure you have a plan of what "objects" and functionality the site is to have (eg. list of courses, course detail page, course search, etc). You should be able to visualise the site and have some design mockups ready. It would also help to know whether it's going to be multi-language or not.
Generate Doctrine models & form classes on the back of your db
Create home page placeholder (probably a module) and a logged-in home page placeholder (probably a module) + basic layouts for further tweaking later.
Create signup & authentication processes (so you have the core functionality of adding users, signing them in and signing them out). Use sfDoctrineGuardPlugin.
Now, start creating core modules one by one according to your plan. As you progress, you'll notice what bits make sense as partials/components and where an additional module might make sense. Add new routing rules as you go along.
Finally, add any little bits, cleanup your template HTML/CSS, JS files, etc
... this way you have a work-in-progress site that you can play around with as you go along.
If I were you, I would try to follow this tutorial : http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_4/Doctrine/en/ You can certainly match each step of the tutorial with a feature your website has.