Active Scaffold Address Book

Feb 07

Posted by Annalisa Afeltra in Ruby on Rails - comments are closed

I created an address book just to get an idea of how the active_scaffold plugin works, it’s pretty neat! It saves you a lot of time setting up the base of your web application.

I followed the tutorial that I found on Active scaffold

Lets look at my example:

Firstly create a simple address book project with two models, contact and client and generate their corresponding controllers. Therefore the address book will contain a list of contacts with their clients.

In the client model, add belongs_to :contact and in the contact model has_many :clients.

After setting up the small application install the active scaffold plugin with the following:


./script/plugin install http://activescaffold.googlecode.com/svn/tags/active_scaffold

Create a new layout called admin:


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
       "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
  <title>Address Book</title>
      <%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>
    <%= active_scaffold_includes %>
</head>
<body>

<p style="color: green"><%= flash[:notice] %></p>

<%= yield  %>

</body>
</html>

All the magic happens in the controllers, in the contacts_controller add the following:


  layout "admin" 

  active_scaffold :contact do |config|
    config.label = "Contacts" 
    config.columns = [:name, :surname, :tel, :email]
    list.columns.exclude :email 
    list.sorting = {:name => 'ASC'}
    columns[:tel].label = "Phone #" 
    columns[:tel].description = "(Format: ###-###-####)" 
  end

and in the clients_controller add:


  layout 'admin'

  active_scaffold :client do |config|
    config.columns = [:contact, :name, :surname, :tel, :email]
    columns[:name].label = "Name" 
    columns[:surname].label ="Surname" 
    columns[:tel].label = "Phone" 
    columns[:email].label = "@E-mail" 
  end

run the application and see how your application has become active in just a few simple steps….

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