Using Activescaffold to enhance the functionality of Ruby on Rails

Liberate RoR: Let Activescaffold to manage data entry page

Introduction: Save some time, less headaches, use the Ruby on Rails activescaffold plug-in can create pages that are easier to maintain. Activescaffold can handle all the CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations required by the user interface, which saves you more time to focus on more challenging (and more interesting) issues.

Writing a web-based data entry UI for a complex application is never a happy thing, and is usually very tedious. A key attribute of a good user interface is consistency, but it requires a knowledgeable and diligent development team to design Web pages that meet this design standard. Like other Web application frameworks, Ruby on Rails has the same problem. However, the dynamic nature of the Ruby language provides a solution: Activescaffold. Activescaffold is a plug-in for Ruby on Rails (also known as rails), which dynamically generates model-based views. Instead of creating a page to display the model manually, Activescaffold can examine the ActiveRecord model from the inside and dynamically generate a CRUD (create, read, update, delete) user interface to manage these objects.

This article is based on the current version of Activescaffold, Ruby, and Rails that is available (at the time of writing) (see Resources for links and version numbers). Also, this article assumes that you are very familiar with Ruby on Rails and are using the linux® or Mac OS X system. Windows® users should modify the commands given in this article to suit their environment (for example, add ' Ruby ' to the front of the script command).

Install Activescaffold

Because Activescaffold is a Rails plug-in, it can be installed from a remote WEB or Subversion server. The following command obtains the Activescaffold from the Activescaffold Subversion server.

Listing 1. Installing the Activescaffold Plugin

Script/plugin Install 

Http://activescaffold.googlecode.com/svn/tags/active_scaffold

Note that this will get the current release of Activescaffold (that is, the latest release). This article was written with a 1.0 release, but you can also use a future release: Activescaffold developers have so far been keeping a good eye on compatibility issues.