Basepack

Basepack is a Ruby on Rails framework for quick creation of information systems.

Features

• Quick development of forms - generates forms for resource by short DSL metadata settings.
• Rich set of business types support (datetime, wysiwig, tags, phone number, ...)
• Search and filtering, saved filters
• Automatic form validation
• Import and Export functionality for resource
• Easy way to create custom actions
• Authentication (via Devise)
• Authorization (via Cancan)

Documentation

Turorial

See project wiki.

Demo

currently we are preparing basepace_example application

The running application will be available at http://basepack-example.herokuapp.com/

Installation

In your Gemfile, add the following dependencies:

gem "basepack",      git: "https://github.com/lksv/basepack.git"

Run:

bundle install

And then run:

rails g basepack:install

This generator will install Basepack, Devise and CanCan and following gems

• inherited_resources
• ransack
• kaminari
• simple_form
• settingslogic
• twitter-bootstrap-rails
• bootbox-rails

if you don't already have them installed.

Define inital ability in app/models/ability.rb. You can put can :manage, :all to enable anybody to perform any action on any object. See more on CanCan wiki.

Migrate your database and start the server:

rake db:migrate
rails s

Generator usage

You can easily generate new resource (scaffold for the resource) by rails g scaffold NAME [field[:type][:index] field[:type][:index]] [options]. E.g.

rails g scaffold Project name short_description description:text start:date finish:date
rails g scaffold Task name description:text project:references user:references

Then rake db:migrate rails s

Notice that files for views are not generated (directories appp/views/projects and appp/views/tasks are empty), but all RESTful actions are working correctly. It is because views iherit default structure and you can easily override these defaults by creating appropriate files.

Basic usage

After scaffolding your resources, you can customize fields used in individual actions by Railsdmin DSL

File app/models/project.rb:

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :tasks, inverse_of: :project
  validates :name, :short_description, presence: true

  rails_admin do
    list do
      field :name
      field :short_description
      field :finish
    end

    edit do
      field :name
      field :short_description
      field :description, :wysihtml5
      field :start
      field :finish
     end 

     show do
       field :name
       field :description
       field :start
       field :finish
     end 
  end 
end

File app/models/task.rb

class Task < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :project, inverse_of: :tasks
  belongs_to :user
end

IMPORTANT! Make sure that you define inverse_of option on has_one, has_many and belongs_to associations. It is necessary for correct functioning of Basepack, see Rails documentation for explaination.

Another difference is controllers which inherit from ResourcesController. Full inheritance hierarchy looks this way:

ProjectsController < ResourcesController < Basepack::BaseController < InheritedResources::Base

If you are not familiar with InheritedResources, take a look at it.

Basepack::BaseController adds to it:

• strong parameters handling
• options method
• taggings method
• build_resource method

You do NOT need to define permitted parameters anymore. It is defined by RailsAdmin DSL, more precisely by what you set as visible in edit action. So file app/models/project.rb:

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  ...
    edit do
      field :name
      field :short_description
      field :description, :wysihtml5
      field :start
      field :finish
     end 
  ...
end

implicitly sets permitted params which could be written as:

def permitted_params
  params.permit(:project => [:name, :short_description, :description, :start, :finish])
end

in your projects controller. You can override these implicit settings by creating this method in case you want it.

Basic Architecture Background

Basepack is build on the top of several gems:

• Device for Authentication
• CanCan for Authorization
• InheritedResources makes your controllers inherit all restful actions.
• SimpleForm for creating Forms.
• nested-form for handling multiple models in a single form
• bootstrap-sass
• ...and others

Althoug you can use Basepack without knowing anything of the background architecture it is recommended to get to know at least with: InheritedResources, CanCan and Device.

Basepack was also inspired by RailsAdmin and still using RailsAdmin DSL for defining the forms.

TODO - explain the concept. Class Basepack::Form::Base and Basepack::Form::Fields::Base. Controller action as <form_name>_form_for and form_factory_rails_admin.

Customining Views

Customizing Form View

License

This project rocks and uses LGPL-LICENSE.

Credits

RailsAdmin field forms was originaly taken from rails-admin.

nested_form_ui - stylesheed and code for orderable was inspired by this project.