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 and streamlined and think they are both very attractive and they should be simple to get running, but I don't quite understand how to set up either one as a backend administration page. They seem designed to work like standard Ruby on Rails generators/scaffolds for creating visible front ends with model-view-controller-table name correspondence. How do you create a admin_players interface when players is already in use and you want to avoid, as much as possible, affecting any of its related files? The show, edit and index of the original resource are not usuable for the administrator.

Accepted Answer

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.

Backend administration in Ruby on Rails

Solution

Problem