activescaffold - filtering lists with custom methods

Posted by chetan
on Monday, October 22
These days I am using activescaffold plugin to build an admin portal for one of the RoR projects I work on. We have around 30+ tables, 30+ primary keys or unique indices and 60+ foreign keys, and most of the tables don't follow activerecord conventions of having primary key as 'id' etc thus it is moreover porting an admin portal for legacy system on RoR.

While building this portal I had to create custom methods which filter, based on indices, the data list. Now, creating custom methods is not a grind in activescaffold but filtering list is :-

Solution
  • add a custom method - suppose "filter_by_foreign_key_2"
  • copy paste the 'find_page' method from vendor/plugins/active_scaffold/lib/finder.rb to your controller - this overrides the 'find_page' method
  • in your controller create this custom method "filter_by_foreign_key_2" and call 'list' method 
        def filter_by_foreign_key_2
      list
    end
  • add below lines to 'find_page' in your controller so that we specify which condition to use when action is "filter_by_foreign_key_2" 
        case params[:action]
      when "filter_by_foreign_key_2" : condition = "foreign_key='yell'"
    end
  • now, find text 'finder_options' in 'find_page' method and change 
    :conditions => all_conditions
    to 
    :conditions => condition