acts_as_indexable

This gem is a Rails engine that provides a configurable DSL for rendering tables in index views of your application. It works with any collection of enumerable objects, ActiveRecord or otherwise.

Usage

You first need to install the gem via Bundler by adding the following to your application’s Gemfile…

gem ‘acts_as_indexable’, ‘~> 0.0.1’

In your controller, you need to include the ActsAsIndexable::View concern and define the attributes you’d like to render within your table via the current_attrs method…

class WidgetsController < ApplicationController
  include ActsAsIndexable::View

  def current_attrs
    {
      id: {},
      title: {},
      created_at: {}
    }
  end
end

Lastly, drop the following helper method into your template, passing your enumerable collection of objects as the first argument…

<%= render_indexable Widget.all %>

This should render something similar to the following…

Add custom class selectors to your table by passing them along to render_indexable, like so...

<%= render_indexable Widget.all, class: 'table table-striped' %>

Customizations

For more control over what attributes are exposed, you can define @current_attrs directly within an action or before_filter. For example…

def index
  @current_attrs = {
    id: {},
    username: {}
  }
end

There are number of other customizations you can invoke on each attribute to get the output of your table exactly the way you want it. To customize any attribute, you simply pass the following keys/values within each attribute definition, like so...

{
  title: {
    link_to: :self,
    class: 'btn',
    label: 'Name',
    ...
  }
}

Descriptions for the available customization options are as follows...

Key	Description
label	Customize the th element for each attribute
link_to	Link the attribute's value. Acceptable values are :self and /path/to/:id
label	Customize the th element for each attribute
format	Format the value according to current locale. Useful for customizing date/time objects
partial	Path to custom partial for the contents of td

Actions

Because most index views need a column for relevant CTAs, you can define a special attribute called actions to handle this. The declaration for this column deviates from the above conventions slightly, such that you can define multiple links to be rendered...

{
  actions: {
    edit: { class: 'btn btn-primary' },
    delete: { class: 'btn btn-secondary' }
  }
}

Testing

bundle exec rspec

License

This project rocks and uses MIT-LICENSE.