HowTo: Reusing Admin Area

Basics

Before we start, make sure you're familiar with how Rails Engines can be modified. Please take 2 minutes to read this: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html#improving-engine-functionality

If you wish, you can re-use Occams' admin area for things you need to administer in your application. To do this, first you will need to make your admin controllers to inherit from Admin::Cms::BaseController. This way, your admin views will be using Occams' admin layout and it's basic HttpAuth.

class Admin::CategoriesController < Occams::Admin::Cms::BaseController
  # your code goes here
end

Adding custom JS/CSS to the admin area

After installing CMS you should be able to find /app/assets/javascripts/occams/admin/cms/custom.js and /app/assets/stylesheets/occams/admin/cms/custom.sass in your app. Anything you put in there will be available in all admin views.

Scaffold Generator

Easiest way to generate your admin CRUD interface is to run rails g occams:scaffold. Works pretty much the same way as a standard Rails scaffold generator. For example let's generate admin area for Locations. Simply run something like this:

rails g occams:scaffold Location name:string distance:integer

After running it you should get:

• db/migrate/create_locations.rb migration file. Don't forget your indexes.
• app/models/location.rb model file
• test/fixtures/locations.yml test fixture file
• test/models/location_test.rb actual tests for Location. Has a assert_errors_on helper call. Replace with what works for you.
• app/controllers/admin/locations_controller.rb admin controller
• test/controllers/admin/locations_controller_test.rb tests for the admin controller.
• app/views/admin/locations/ with all the views
• routes.rb will be updated, but you want to put new route in a proper spot.
• app/views/occams/admin/cms/partials/_navigation_inner.html.haml will be updated/created to add link to the side nav

Changing Views

You can outright modify any view from your application by creating same file with a matching path. However there are a pile of partials that can be used to inject bits of html all over the place. To see what's available change config.reveal_cms_partials to true and restart application.

Changing Models/Controllers

If you need to do some serious hacking I recommend forking entire project. You can always do monkey-patching or file overwrites from your application.