Adding custom actions

When you add custom actions to a controller which uses ActiveScaffold, probably you will want to keep look and feel. Also, you have to follow some conventions so your action behaves as default actions, and ActiveScaffold provides some methods to DRY your code.

Process and refresh action

It could be an action which acts over some marked records, or a record action. It's like delete action, which doesn't display a form and then do some processing. For a collection action it will refresh the list, for a member action it will refresh row and messages, and calculations if are used.

You must remember to set :position to false too, because your action won't return html code. You should set method to :put, because you will change some records, and :crud_type if you want to do security checks with that.

On the other hand, you should use process_action_link_action method in your action. This method has two optional arguments:

1. A name to override default responses (action_update). If you set this argument, you will have to define <name>_respond_to_<format> method for each format you want to respond.
2. The crud_type to check security when loading the record. By default it will try to guess it.

Don't forget to set sucessful to true if all goes right.

  class InvoicesController < ApplicationController
    active_scaffold do |config|
      config.action_links.add :paid, :member => true, :crud_type => :update, :method => :put, :position => nil
      [more configuration]
    end

    def paid
      process_action_link_action do |record|
        if (self.successful = record.paid!)
          flash[:info] = as_(:invoce_paid)
        else
          flash[:error] = as_(:invoce_cannot_be_paid)
        end
      end
    end
  end

If you want to process each record in last visited page you can use each_record_in_page iterator. If you want to process all records, obeying search and custom conditions (conditions from params, conditions_from_collection, constraints and so on) you can use each_record_in_scope iterator.

  class InvoicesController < ApplicationController
    active_scaffold do |config|
      config.action_links.add :paid, :method => :put, :position => nil
      [more configuration]
    end

    def paid
      process_action_link_action do
        self.successful = true
        each_record_in_page { |record| record.paid! }
      end
    end
  end