Question

We are wanting to add a help page to our admin and we are using the active admin gem. This page is not associated to any model so I am struggling trying to figure out how to get the link to show up in the menu bar on every page.

Answer 1

Warning: this is hopelessly outdated, and not relevant in 2020 anymore. This was for activeadmin <0.7 versions.

Make a file /app/models/help.rb with this contents, for more advanced tableless models you might want to check out http://keithmcdonnell.net/activerecord_tableless_model_gem.html or google your own insight together.

class Help < ActiveRecord::Base

  def self.columns 
    @columns ||= []
  end

  # ...  

end

add an entry to /config/initializers/inflections.rb

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
  inflect.uncountable %w( help )
end

set up a route for your viewlogger, in config/routes.rb:

match '/admin/help' => 'admin/help#index', :as => :admin_help

now you can formulate the activeadmin register block as follows (make you sure you create a view partial in the right place)

ActiveAdmin.register Help do      
  config.comments = false
  before_filter do @skip_sidebar = true end
  # menu false
  config.clear_action_items!   # this will prevent the 'new button' showing up    
  controller do
    def index
      # some hopefully useful code
      render 'admin/help/index', :layout => 'active_admin'
    end
  end   

end