Asset Manager

Asset Manager is a Ruby on Rails gem that allows you to:

Manage all your assets (images, pdf, zip, ecc.) in a central repository
Quickly connect instances of your models with this repository, through a nice graphical interface
Generate markup for your assets in your views with a series of helper methods

To give you a practical example, you can upload an image through the Asset Manager and then associate it to a product and a news article without having to upload it twice. You just make your selection from the central repository. Asset Manager is generally included in an administration interface where the user manages all her assets and associates them with various application specific model instances. Then, on the frontend side, to present these assets to the end-user.

Please note: Asset Manager doesn’t have anything to do with Rails’ asset pipeline!

Installation

Add it to your Gemfile:

gem 'intesys_asset_manager'

Install the migrations:

rake asset_manager:install:migrations
rake db:migrate

Usage

Since Asset Manager is a Rails engine you need to mount it in your application:

in config/routes.rb:

Rails::Application.routes.draw do
  mount AssetManager::Engine => '/asset_manager'
end

Once mounted you can access the administration interface by visiting /asset_manager in a browser.

From here you can manage all your application’s assets: jpg, png, pdf, zip, etc. For the images that you upload a series of (customizable) versions will be created automatically.

Next you need to specify which of your models will be connected to the Asset Manager. If, for example, we have a Product that has a main image and a series of pictures and downloads we add the following to our Product model:

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_image :main_image
  has_images :pictures, max: 10
  has_files :downloads
end

You have two methods to choose from: has_file when the association is singular and has_files when multiple files need to be associated. These methods accept a series of parameters to specify which file types are accepted, how many files can be associated (for has_files), etc.

Once you have your models configured you can connect assets with your records. Asset Manager provides Formtastic and SimpleForm input types to make it easier to manage your forms:

= semantic_form_for @product do |f|
  = f.inputs do
    = f.input :title
    = f.input :description
  = f.inputs
    = f.input :main_image, as: :asset_manager
    = f.input :pictures, as: :asset_manager
    = f.input :downloads, as: :asset_manager

The Asset Manager will be opened in a modal window so your application needs to provide one. For example, if you’re using Fancybox you need to add the following to your application.js:

//= require fancybox2
$ ->
  $(".asset_manager_iframe").fancybox
    type: 'iframe'
    width: '100%'
    height: '100%'
    autoSize: false
    helpers:
      title:
        type: 'outside'

Then you will have something similar to:

Now that we have associated assets with our records we can use one of the view helpers provided by Asset Manager to present them to the end-user:

= am_render(@product, :main_image)
= am_render(@product, :pictures)
= am_render(@product, :downloads)

Options

Asset Manager can be configured through an initializer config/initializers/asset_manager.rb

AssetManager.configure do |config|
  ...
end

Private/Public Assets

By default all your assets will be public. It’s also possible to have private assets or a mix of both.

config.asset_types = [:public, :private]

Categories and Tags

By default all your assets can be categorized and tagged to keep things organized. You can disable this option.

config.with_categories = false
config.with_tags = false

Image processing

Asset Manager relies on ImageMagick to process images (for thumbnails etc.). To specify how the processing is done and which formats are created you can redefine custom_versions:

module AssetManager
  module CustomVersions

    # For a list of possible options, take a look at:
    # http://carrierwave.rubyforge.org/rdoc/classes/CarrierWave/RMagick.html
    def custom_versions
      version :thumb, :if => :image? do
        process :resize_and_pad => [50, 50]
      end
    end

  end
end

There is also a rake task to re-process already existing images when you add a new format:

rake asset_manager:recreate_versions

Default Image Formats

A list of file formats that will be accepted for has_image and has_images.

config.default_image_formats = %w(jpg jpeg gif png)

Project Roadmap

FCKEditor (Rich) integration
Evaluate dragonfly
Test :)

Project Info

Asset Manager was created by Federico Bonomi with contributions from Nicola Prando, Daniel Jonasson and Umberto Gariggio

The project is hosted on Github: github.com/intesys/asset_manager, where your contributions, forkings, comments, issues and feedback are greatly welcomed.