Synthesis: RoR Grid Control Part II

RoR Grid Control Part II

sbecker — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 01:52:00 -0700

My reusable “grid control” with paging and filtering is almost finished. I made some changes to the syntax, and I converted the whole thing to a component, so it can simply be dropped in the components directory of a rails app and used as is.

Defining the columns is very DRY, the minimum thing you have to specify for each column is a title. From this the component will guess the actual database column to be the same (with spaces converted to underscores). If your database column name is different, you can specify that.

I also added some display format options, including “email”, “website” and “money” and “date”. These will make the columns look and behave as you would expect.

Here’s what the code to call it looks like now:

  def my_controller_method
    grid_html = render_component_as_string(:controller => 'controls/grid', :action => 'grid',
      :params => {
        :model => Product,
        :obj => params[:obj],
        :columns => [
          { :title => "Category",
             :db_column => "category_name",
             :filter_type => :select,
             :filter_column => "category_id",
             :filter_options => Category.find(:all, :order => "name ASC").collect {|c| [ c.name, c.id ] }
          },
          { :title => "Name" },
          { :title => "Published",
             :filter_type => :select,
             :filter_options => Product.published_options
          },
          { :title => "Featured",
             :filter_type => :select,
             :filter_options => Product.featured_options
          },
          { :title => "Retail", 
             :db_column => "retail_price", 
             :format => :money, 
             :filter => :false 
          },
          { :title => "Stock", 
             :db_column => "in_stock", 
             :filter => :false }
        ],
        :joins => ["LEFT OUTER JOIN categories ON products.category_id = categories.id"],
        :alias_columns => [["categories.name", "category_name"]],
        :order_by => "category_name, products.name",
        :per_page => 25
      })
    render :text => grid_html, :layout => true
  end

Once I get everything reasonably ironed out and add a few more things like sorting, I plan to open source this code…

Again, here is what mine looks like. This could easily be customized to look any way you want, by simply modifying the view rhtml file:

"RoR Grid Control Part II" by Omer Raviv

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:21:44 -0800

Just another vote for releasing this to the public :) It looks spectecular. Open sourcing it and allowing people to offer patched\improvements\comments should make it even more so. Please, please, gimme! :)

"RoR Grid Control Part II" by Adrian Madrid

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:28:05 -0800

Me too! Please let us know where you are at and if you are releasing it. Thanks! AEM

"RoR Grid Control Part II" by Bryan

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 08:17:36 -0800

Just wondering where this project is at... I'd like to use it :)

"RoR Grid Control Part II" by scott

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 06:39:10 -0700

ntollervey - err, soon! i need to modify the paging buttons to pass along any filtering parameters, and then it should basically work 100%. as to where, here will be a good place to look im sure! Stuart - awesome, thanks for the IIS tips, I'll have to try that! yes, ajax for in place editing, i like that idea... hmm, shouldn't actually be too hard...

"RoR Grid Control Part II" by Stuart Johnson

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 15:31:50 -0700

great effort! This sort of thing had been on my wishlist since I started looking at Rails seriously. A cool next step once the core functionality is in place would be to add Ajax for an edit in place data grid (!) ... ps - if you're still having problems with IIS and Rails, I've posted some possible fixes in a response to http://rubyforiis.sosukodo.org/rubyforiis/feedback/unabletoconnecttofastcgiserver

"RoR Grid Control Part II" by ntollervey

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 14:40:39 -0700

Just wondering how this project was progressing. It looks like its exactly what I need for a current RoR project. When (and where) will this code be released?