Crudify

A dynamic resource controller for Rails 3 that keeps your controllers nice and skinny.

Crudify was shamelessly robbed from refinerycms's internals and customized for use in other projects. Much credit and many thanks to the guys at resolve digital for all their hard work on the refinery cms project. Keep it up!

Installation

It's best to install crudify by adding your Rails 3 project's Gemfile:

# Gemfile
source "http://rubygems.org"
gem 'rails',   '>= 3.0.0'        
gem 'crudify', '>= 0.0.7'

Now run:

bundle install

Usage

In its most basic form, crudify is designed to be use like this:

class JelliesController < ApplicationController
  crudify :jelly
end

Ok, so what does it do? The short answer; everything that you'd want it to. In more detail, crudify turns your controller into a full-fledged CRUD controller with index, new, create, show, edit, update, and destroy. But wait, there's more! Inside each of these standard methods are several hook methods designed to make customizing your controllers even easier that overwriting crudify's methods. Overwriting; say what? ...

Say you want to customize an action that's being defined by crudify, simply overwrite it!

class JelliesController < ApplicationController
  crudify :jelly

  def create     
    @jelly = Jelly.new(params[:jelly])
    # ... the rest of your custom action
  end
end

Ok that seems easy enough, but what if my action is just a tiny bit different? That's where the hook methods come in...

Hook Methods

Laced into crudify's actions are a module full of methods designed to make customizing your controller quick and simple. Let's examine these methods in further detail starting with create.

Here's what lines #45-59 in lib/crudify/class_methods.rb will produce in our Jellies controller:

def create
  # if the position field exists, set this object as last object, given the conditions of this class.
  if Jelly.column_names.include?("position")
    params[:jelly].merge!({
      :position => ((Jelly.maximum(:position, :conditions => "")||-1) + 1)
    })
  end
  @instance = @jelly = Jelly.new(params[:jelly])
  before_create
  if @instance.valid? && @instance.save
    successful_create
  else
    failed_create
  end
end

Just before the calls to valid? and save, you'll see before_create; the first hook method in the action. Looking further into the source, before_create is nothing more than a blank action, waiting to be overwritten:

  def before_create
    # just a hook!
    puts "> Crud::before_create" if @crud_options[:log]
    before_action
  end

Notice that before_create calls a second hook; before_action. This is a generic hook that fires before every crud method's call to save, update or destroy. This means it might be helpful for you to call super when overwriting this method so that the chain of hooks keeps firing. Inside the before_action method we'll decide what to use as flash messages with set_what. Here's the code for before_action:

  def before_action
    # just a hook!
    puts "> Crud::before_action" if @crud_options[:log]
    set_what
    true
  end

Ok Ok, so we're gettin' kind of deep here. Let's get back to the basic concept; Skinny, sexy and easy on the eyes. (Are we still talking ruby here?)

Here's an example of a before_create hook:

class InquiriesController < ApplicationController
  crudify :inquiry

  def before_create
    @inquiry.ip_address = request.remote_addr
    super
  end

end

And a successful_create hook:

class InquiriesController < ApplicationController
  crudify :inquiry

  def successful_create
    InquiryMailer.message(@inquiry).deliver!
    super
  end

end

To find out more about crudify, read the source! Here's some helpful links:

For available options: Crudify::Base
For available hooks: Crudify::HookMethods
To see which hooks go where: Cruidfy::ClassMethods

Also, check out the demo app in test/dummy...

Testing

Shoulda and Capybara/Selenium tests can be run by cloning the repo and running rake:

git clone git://github.com/citrus/crudify.git
cd crudify
bundle install
rake

To Do

There's a few things to be done still...

Tests for search
More Documentation & Examples
Nested set tests and demo (haven't even tried this yet :/)
Generally more thorough tests
Refactoring/Optimizing

License

Although many things have been rewritten, crudify is released under Resolve Digital's original license since portions code were extracted from their refinerycms project.

MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.