Active scaffold is a plug in provide Ajax based user interface for a rails project. You can use it for Admin side activities An AJAXified interface for creating, updating and deleting objects

• Automatic handling of ActiveRecord associations


• Sorting and Searching


• CSS styling and theming support


• Work on Firefox 1+, IE 6+ and Safari 2+


• Released under the MIT License, the same one as Rails itself, so you can use it freely in your commercial applications.

Step-1:
Install the plugin from the url:

./script/plugin install http://activescaffold.googlecode.com/svn/tags/active_scaffold

Step-2:
Add to your layout

<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>

<%= active_scaffold_includes %>

Step-3:
Add to your controller

active_scaffold :model_name

Active scaffold requires a separate controller for a single model.If you do not want some attributes fields...
Add to your Application controller

  ActiveScaffold.set_defaults do |config|

     config.ignore_columns.add [:created_at, :updated_at, :status]

  end

or you can add to your controller for the attributes fields you want to to display

  active_scaffold :TechniquesEmployed do |config|

     config.label = "Techniques Employed"

     config.columns = [:techniques_employed]

     columns[:techniques_employed].label = "Technique Employed"

  end

Has and Belongs to Many with Multiple Check boxes

So if you are trying to do a multiple select of checkboxes and using habtm in your project, but when you submit the form, only one value was available in your controller. While you try to edit records in database but because of some error you get back to the pre field form and you found that the checkboxes checked by you gone ,then here’s the solution

Model:

   class Customer < ActiveRecord::Base

     has_and_belongs_to_many :intrests

   end

Controller code:

    class CustomersController < ApplicationController

      def create

        if request.post?

           @customer=Customer.new(params[:customer])

           @customer.save

        end

      end


      def edit

       @customer=Customer.find_by_id(params[:id]) if params[:id]

       if @customer

        if request.post?

         if @customer.update_attributes(customer)

           flash.now[:message]="Update successfully "

         end

        end

       else

        flash[:message]="Page requested by you does not exists"

       end

      end

    end

Your View:

   <% form_for :customer,  do |f| -%>

     First Name:

      <%= f.text_field :first_name  -%>

     Last Name:

      <%= f.text_field :last_name -%>

     <% for intr in total_intrests -%>

      <%= check_box_tag "customer[interest_ids][]","#{intr.id}",

          interest(intr) -%> # interest is a helper method  

      <%= "#{intr.name}" -%>

     <% end -%>

   <% end -%>

helper method

  def interest(i)

    if @customer

      @customer.interests.include?(i)

    else

      false

    end

  end

View generate a checkbox for every interest(all_interest=Interest.find(:all)). The name of the input is significant obviously. The trailing “[]” on the name means the end result will be the list of checked ids. This list will be stored on the @params['customer'] hash with the key ‘interest_ids’. When the controller calls @customer.update_attributes(@params[:customer]), it tries to call @customer.key= for each of the keys on @params[:customer]. What’s important to realize is that these keys don’t have to actually be attributes on the Customer model. All that’s important is that there’s a key= method on the model. Model automatically contains a “collection_ids=” method for habtm and has-many associations.

This method will load the objects identified by the ids and call the “interest=(list)” method on the model with the freshly loaded list. This method in turn, will compare the list to the current list of interests and delete/add interests as necessary.

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