{ height: 1%; } - Ruby on Rails and User Interface Design

Ajax Scaffold Plugin Released

Posted by Richard White Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:09:00 GMT

AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold

Ajax Scaffold is nice, but generated code just doesn’t scale well. There’s too much effort required to make cross cutting changes.

I really like Ajax Scaffold but it’s really hard to upgrade when a new version comes out. I usually spend a couple hours diffing all my scaffolds with a newly generated one.

I couldn’t agree more and we now have an answer to those problems: an Ajax Scaffold plugin. Creating a scaffold is now as easy as:

class WidgetController < ApplicationController

  ajax_scaffold :widget

end

Need extra control over the displayed data?

class WidgetController < ApplicationController

  ajax_scaffold :widget

  @@scaffold_columns = [
    AjaxScaffold::ScaffoldColumn.new(Task, {:name => "name", 
         :sort => "name.downcase" }),
    AjaxScaffold::ScaffoldColumn.new(Task, {:name => "tags", 
         :eval => "widget.tag_names.collect{|t|h(t)}.join(', ')" })
  ]

end

And it can scale up to be just as customizable as the generated code. Need to customize the form partial? Just copy _form.rhtml into your controller’s view directory and change it. If you’re new to Ajax Scaffold you will probably want to play around with a generated scaffold first to get a feel for how all the pieces (controllers, views, etc) fit together as the plugin code is a bit more complex (but should make sense if you’ve used the Ajax Scaffold generator).

The plugin is almost a direct port of the functionality of the existing Ajax Scaffold generator with a few extra conveniences tacked on (total rows, sorting by method, etc). One major difference is that the scaffold_columns definitions have been moved from the model to the controller (The generator will be going this way in it’s next release).

We will be versioning the two projects in parallel to keep confusion to a minimum. The plugin release is 3.2.0 which will be the same version as the next generator release that incorporates some of the changes the plugin has made (scaffold_columns in the controller).

Many thanks go to Scott Rutherford for writing the bulk of the code as well as the howto guides (which you can get to via the Ajax Scaffold wiki). Ready to get started?