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 a

Answer 1

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.