Question

I’m using rails-settings by Squeegy from https://github.com/Squeegy/rails-settings as well as Activeadmin. What I’m trying to accomplish is making a form in ActiveAdmin that I can let the site admin change the settings for the site, which take a command line syntax of:

Setting.foo = "bar"
Setting.site_title = "My Awesome Site!"
Setting.max_users = 35

I really don’t think I’ve got too far, but I’m already stuck. I’m up to the point of having a custom ActiveAdmin form made:

ActiveAdmin.register_page "Settings" do
  action_item do
    link_to "View Site", "/"
  end


  content do
    form do |f|
      #Inputs for Settings 
    end
  end
end

But I don’t even know how to begin laying out the form to directly access the Settings model, or how to make a custom controller to handle the input. I suppose if I could get the input sent to a controller that I could make, I’d be just fine.

Answer 1

I don’t think you want your site’s form to directly change the settings in ActiveAdmin, I would …

1. Create a new table, eg. adminsettings and add fields for each of the settings you want to store for instance site_title, alternatively you could use each row for a setting which means you can add new settings in the future without changing the database

2. Put together a form in Activeadmin to maintain your settings

3. Add some functions to your model to grab the settings so you can do something like ..

   Setting.site_title = Adminsetting.getsitetitle

You could be clever with your model method and use the method_missing facility so you need the least amount of code to get a setting …

class << self 
  def method_missing(method, *args, &block)
    setting = Adminsetting.where(:code => method.to_s).first
    if setting
      return setting.content
    else
      return super(method, *args, &block)
    end
 end

Perhaps you could package this into a Gem as it could be a useful thing for others.