Question

I’m using ActiveAdmin with Ruby on Rails to develop an admin section of a webapp. I’m building an index page for a model that has a lot of attributes. Most of these attributes I’ve enabled filters for, but I can’t show them all on the index table because it becomes too cluttered. Is there a way to dynamically show/hide columns on the table based on what filters are used? Is there a better approach to this problem?

Answer 1

I’ve found a bit of an answer to this problem, but it’s not pretty and definitely not very DRY.

You can actually use if statements inside the ActiveAdmin DSL index method. Also, ActiveAdmin passes filters as a q[] GET parameter. For instance, a string field named “username” would be the q[username_contains] GET parameter. A numeric field named “number_of_posts” could be q[number_of_posts_eq]. Using this we can look at an example where we display number of posts if they’ve been filtered, or the user’s email address, if they haven’t:

ActiveAdmin.register User do
    index do
        column :username
        column :first_name
        column :last_name
        if(params[:'q[number_of_posts_eq]'])
            column :number_of_posts
        else
            column :email
        end
    end

    filter :number_of_posts
end

Of course, there are many different filter types, so the query parameters are all going to be different depending on the type. Even the numeric type has _eq, _lt, and _gt suffixes for equals, less-than, and greater-than respectively.