My current project is in Rails. Coming from a Symfony (PHP) and Django (Python) background, they both have excellent admin generators. Seems like this is missing in Rails.
For those who aren't familiar with Symfony or Django, they both allow you to specify some metadata around your models to automatically (dynamically) generate an admin interface to do the common CRUD operations. You can create an entire Intranet with only a few commands or lines of code. They have a good appearance and are extensible enough for 99% of your admin needs.
I've looked for something similar for Rails, but all of the projects either have no activity or they died long ago. Is there anything to generate an intranet/admin site for a rails app other than scaffolding?
Active Admin (http://activeadmin.info/) was released in May of 2011, and looks like it's going to become the best Rails 3 option.
rails_admin appears to be the latest-n-greatest free project as of January 2011.
...best of all, there has been a lot of activity in the repository.
Scaffolding is the normal way to create an admin backend BUT there is a project called ActiveScaffold which may solve your problem.
Here is a roundup of a few options, including more than just ActiveScaffold.
ActiveScaffold is available for Rails 2.3.x :)
Just for someonse's info who have found this question one year later like me :)
ActiveScaffold is a good solution, but if you want a more configurable and powerful tool, I think Typus is a great solution:
http://github.com/fesplugas/typus
You have mainly two:
ActiveScaffolding: the most popular but be careful with rails 2.1
Streamlined
ActiveScaffold is by far and away the most configurable/easiest to integrate/most automagic scaffolding around at the moment.
It has built in ajax support, near seamless db introspection and it even plays nicely with legacy Oracle databases (which can be a real pain in Rails).
Try it: http://activescaffold.com/
Have a look at Casein (http://www.caseincms.com/), might be what you're looking for.
Having also tried typus, caseincms and ActiveScaffold over the weekend, I can't rave enough about admin_data.
It is
super-quick to install (Rails 3 is the gem, Rails 2.3 is a plugin branch,
no digging through trees on github),
unintrusive (all code is in the vendor/admin_data folder or the gem where it belongs),
requires no set-up and optional configuration is one block in one file in your app,
correctly (!) gets all model information from your model definitions (primary_key, foreign_key, relationships etc.),
including multiple databases, SQL Server connections via activerecord-sqlserver-adapter, and even composite primary keys, as everything is abstracted on top of ActiveRecord, if you model works, admin_data will work,
works great with legacy data for the above reasons,
uses your existing authentication solution which is called in the most wonderful DRYness in your configuration file.
It maybe less flexible or pretty than other solutions, but this plugin does many thingks right for quick admin panel setup.
The most common way to create a CRUD interface is to use Scaffold.
./script/generate scaffold_resource MyModel property:type property2:type2
This command would generate a CRUD interface for the model named MyModel (singular) with two properties. Properties is what's called columns in DB lingo. So you could have name:string age:integer active:boolean etc.
I can suggest you active_admin that is best
Active Admin main site
Related
I'm new in Ruby on Rails, I'm wondering, is there a user interface to see all the data that you have in your Active Record Models and manipulate them just like PhpMyAdmin?
Sadly no - you have to write that interface yourself... :)
There are ways to quickly scaffold up an interface for each of your models. Look at doco on rails generate scaffold for more info.
There are also gems that will automate some admin-scaffolding for you:
Look at eg ActiveAdmin
But in practice nobody keeps either of these around for long in their projects (for various reasons).
If you're new to Rails, I can highly recommend reading your way through the Rails Guides here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org It will help you level up in all the fundamental aspects of Rails :)
There are gems in rails to maintain tables in rails app:
ActiveAdmin: It provides admin panel using which you can add/update/delete any record under tables.
rails_db_info: Just and it under Gemfile and run bundle install. Go to "/rails/info/db" link, it will list all tables with schema details. Its very easy to integrate.
Backbone.js website has some examples. But barring the first one others are not open source. I am looking for a fully functional (meaning it just works) Rails application to study. The app does not need to have too many functionalities. I looked at github and all the apps are broken in some ways.
Recently i found https://github.com/malclocke/fulcrum and it seems to be the best Rails/Backbone example but its not mentioned on the backbone website. Its also a very functional pivotal tracker clone.
I have been working on some non open source projects that use a Rails and Backbone.js stack. Both frameworks can be integrated fairly easily. Of course, it depends on how the application is setup and how you configure each framework to control more or less business logic.
To get both frameworks to play with each other:
Make Backbone collections and models for each Rails model
Route resources for each Rails model
Setup the URL property for the Backbone collections and models to work with your rails routes
Use fetch() and save() in Backbone to get and post data with Rails
I wrote a german language noun trainer using RAILS and backbone.js. It was done a long while ago while I was still learning but you can peek at it if you want.
https://github.com/bradphelan/ohmyderdiedas
I've been actively working on Myelin: http://sourceforge.net/projects/myelin/ (funded from a corporate source)
There are some caveats:
This is essentially a first for me with every technology in there... from rails, to backbone / jquery / rspec... you name it... it's new, so take the code with some grains of salt ;)
I didn't use the Backbone routing, and built a very simple 'router' of my own.
You'll need ganglia and rrdtool installed (macports if you're on a mac should work)
You'll need to alter the development config for sure.
The models, are (mostly) straight up backbone, and I use sync often in the controllers so those should be pretty good examples.
The views are a little more chaotic.
If anyone needs help with anything, just drop a line to me on sourceforge.
There's now a gem in development that provides generators, called rails-backbone. It's Open Source and getting better every day. As of today it's up to date with current Rails 3.1 (actually 3.2 now), esp. including Asset Pipeline, which is very relevant to backbone.js.
I have a Rails 2.3 application which I would like to extract into a plugin, or engine. The application has user authentication, and basic cms capabilities supported by ancestry plugin.
I want to extract the logic for the application into a plugin/engine so that I can use this code for future projects, with a different "skin" or "theme" if required.
I'm not entirely sure I actually understand the difference between plugin and engine concepts, so that would be a good first point.
What is the best approach, are there any good starting points, links, explanations, examples that I should follow. Also, with the release of R3 to consider, is there anything that I should be aware of for that, with regards to plugins etc.
I am going to start off by watching Ryan's http://railscasts.com/episodes/149-rails-engines
but obviously thats over a year old now, so one of the challenges I'm faced with is finding the most up to date and relevant information on this subject.
All tips and help gratefully received.
Actually, converting an application is pretty straigtforward. Just create a plugin-folder, put an app-folder inside containing all yor model-views-controllers folders, and that's it.
You will have to manage your migrations yourself though. Also you have to define rake-tasks to copy files to your public folder. I think the railscasts is still pretty up-to-date, if anything it is now easier in rails 2.3.
Good luck!
[EDIT: for rails3] Rails 3 engines are very clean and powerful. Check this gist by Jose Valim.
You will probably be better off focusing your engine on Rails 3, as opposed to trying to make it compatible for Rails 2 and Rails 3, due to the backwards incompatible changes. Here is a more up to date tutorial for Rails 3
also the book "Crafting Rails applications" by Rails Core member Jose Valim, has a good chapter on it. Int he shows how to use his tool EngineX which generates a Rails 3 engine structure, so you can more easily create engines for your Rails 3 projects. His gem devise is also a rails engine which is also nice, because you can easily customize it by copying the templates into the application directory, and allowing you to subclass the controllers that you want to customize more.
Writing a plugin is an entirely different process than writing an app, if you already have your app code it should be straightforward converting it into a plugin.
Consider that if you use third-party plugins in your app it could get pretty messy.
Is there a pattern or a gem (Ruby on rails) for modeling the wiki-like behaviour of a StackOverflow like web site?
I'm working on Ruby-on-Rails project so a gem or something in RoR would be appreciated but a well defined pattern is just as good.
Thanks
Did you try act_as_versioned? It is available as a gem, and adds simple versioning to any ActiveRecord model.
If you need more features, act_as_revisable might be interesting. According to the link, it adds the following features on top of act_as_versioned:
Pervasive Callbacks
Branching and Changesets
Deletes can be stored as a revision
Explicit is better than implicit
All data for a model is stored in one table
Wrapping up, requirements and installing
I love scaffolding and it extremely helpful for prototyping. But Should we use scaffolding for developing application as such?
The name "scaffolding" is sort of a misnomer in Rails now (post 2.0). The structure generated through scaffolding generator is more of a base application to build on, rather than a "prototype" that you throw away later.
At least, if you are designing your application to be RESTful, you will find yourself keeping most of the scaffold generator produced controller and model code, while adding more logic to them. You will perhaps replace the views eventually while keeping bits and pieces of Ruby code in them.
There is no harm in using scaffold to kick-start development of your application. However, if you are a newbie you need to understand how stuff can be done without it. Scaffold is a tool for rapid prototype development in rails and can be used if you can alter it to suit your requirements quickly.
i use it a lot
i strt off with scaffolding and then gradually replace it with custom code; it's a great way to get something up and running pretty quick.
Actually It's depends on your requirements. When we consider about the scaffold it will generate CRUD(Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations instantly. So if you need to remove some of operations its really easy if you coded it manually. But that also can be done by using scaffold also. Just you have to remove those methods only.
So it's your choice whether you use it or not
I have read some books,the author all told me that a for developer will not use it in they business project.So I am not using it in my project any time.But it is only my options,it is up to you.