I have a customer that wants to build their own questionnaires. Something like WuFoo (www.wufoo.com) but more secure and contained within the app.
I've looked at Smerf (http://github.com/springbok/smerf) which provides the yaml-to-form conversion, but I'd like something the user can use to create their own forms.
I would look at using active_scaffold. The main version has not been updated for Rails 3, but a fork at the location below has. I think it would work well for your purpose, you just need a way to grab the data and feed it in. Here is a demo of what it looks like when it is running:
https://github.com/vhochstein/active_scaffold
Here is a demo at the top of the page:
http://demo.activescaffold.com/roles
You could always embed Google Forms. Might be easier than reinventing the wheel. Unless you have some specific use case this doesn't cover?
If you are not adverse to going the Javascript route the then you might consider one of the many framework plugins like the JQuery Form Builder. From a usability perspective it seems to me that any good solution is going to involve some Javascript. There should be no reason why this approach wouldn't integrate well into a Rails backend
You might want to check out this one. Dynamic Forms
I too am looking for something very similar. What solution did you come up with?
Related
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.
So I want to play with the active_admin gem. Two basic pieces I need is pages and images. I could setup a system myself, but is there any gems or anything out there that make setting this up easy? Ideally the pages would have ability to have custom slugs, nested pages, custom fields etc. And maybe ability to add images to the pages.
Yes yes maybe I should just go with a system like refinery. But I'm curious if there something lighter out there for what I need.
My suggestion: if you want the "lightweight" way, just go to implement your own CMS.
In my experience, for rails application, rebuilt is much easier and faster than refactoring/reuse, if your requirement is kinda of complex.
Maybe you should have a look at active_cms, which is still in active development, but already useful for basic functionality. You can find it here: https://github.com/geisters/active_cms
I need a Rails plugin that gives you the chance to purely separate HTML and any logic in your views. Views should be classes reading the separate markup and replacing it with dynamic content where needed.
Basically Effigy from github does this.
I am looking for something like Wicket, but on the Rails base.
I can remember seeing a plugin from a Rails enterprise that does this. In my memory, it was better and seemed more mature than Effigy. But I forgot its name. It was something like "luxurious" or "delicious"; does anyone know what I am talking about? The plugin was created in a US Rails enterprise.
Any other alternatives would be much appreciated.
I feel that Effigy is almost OK, but it's hard to find tutorials or people using it properly, so I question its the maturity.
Well, if nothing comes up, I will go ahead with Effigy for now.
All right guys, I think I finally found what I was talking about.
The plugin is called "Erector"
The thing that I like about it, is that views are finally plain ruby objects and you can do everything you can usually do in ruby. I found couple of blogposts:
https://github.com/erector/erector
Why I always liked this idea you can easily see in this blogpost
I want to thank the creators for this.
I've recently started working with RoR for some projects and I quite like the framework - however coming from an ASP.NET background I'm quite fond of the idea of being able to purchase & drop in reusable components/control such as those from telerik, without having to 'reinvent'.
I suppose it would be possible to maybe create my own using partials or plugins or similar, but I'm wondering if there is anything out there already, or perhaps alternatives which could be massaged into place, like javascript widgets etc?
I don't know of any commercial components or "controls", but there's thousands (probably, I haven't counted them) of plugins out there freely available, to do a great many things for you, some of which would probably count as "controls". Unfortunately, there's no one place to go and find them, and the quality is depressingly variable, but there are a number of plugin indexes like http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/ that might help in finding what you want while weeding out the dross.
Ext JS is a great GUI toolkit. I can't say that it entirely fits in with the RoR way of doing things, but if you write your controllers to return JSON it isn't too bad.
One of the big differences between Ruby/Rails and the .Net world is the fact that most of the available plugins are open-source and integrate at the code level. There is an incredible array of plugins for Rails, and it is very straight forward to write your own. Due to the nature of Ruby you can hook into any just about any part of the language and framework, giving you impressive extensibility.
I am not sure how Web Controls work, but it sounds like they are a "black-box" that provides an end-to-end solution for both UI and data-level operations ... ?
Many of the Rails plugins do provide both UI and data aspects. An example would be "restful_authentication" which provides you with both some basic forms for login and user registration as well as an authentication module and a Active-Record model. Again, this operates at a code-level, so will actually push the relevant code into your codebase when you install and "generate" the authentication modules.
As for "widgets", there is no equivalent in Rails, per-se, but there are a number of JavaScript libraries that provide similar functionality. I use and recommend jQuery UI, myself.
Dojo has a widget library which might meet your needs.
I have a simple site, using restful_authentication and a simple model for the posts. I would like to use MarsEdit (or something like Ecto) to post/edit content. How would I go about this?
The XML-RPC system is rather bewildering - there's a lot of different variations (Atom, MovableType, metaWeblog, Blogger, TypePad, probably others), never mind actually implementing any of them.. The Action Web Service API in Rails, which is intended to implement such APIs, has deprecated a while ago..
Try a plugin...
http://github.com/calavera/atompub-server/tree/master
Or this library...
http://github.com/inkspot/alumina/tree/master
As a starter/prototype for what you need