I recently tried using ActiveScaffold in a simple application of mine. I've found the process extremely frustrating and had basically given up. After looking through some of the other common choices for admin type interfaces, I'm looking at ActiveScaffold again, as the other choices are even more frustrating.
This is of course my opinion, but as a user new to this lib, I would expect some semblance of an ability to get things running without too much hassle. So, I setup the basics, added active_scaffold :model to a controller, and then set about to try things out. Things blow up immediately with an error about a route not matching show_search. Search? I'm not even thinking about search yet. Why is this a default that can't work on its own? I eventually find the API docs and figure out some way of avoiding the search action. I try loading things up again. This time it bombs with an error about edit_associated something or other. Ok...I comment out the has_and_belongs_to_many call in my model and refresh. Voila, the page loads! So after that first success I go back and try to figure out what to do next. After trying a variety of things I somehow get it to work, sort of. So, in short, I think you've done an incredible job of trying to handle a huge variety of situations and use cases. I know this stuff is complex and I can only imagine the time put into the project. I don't send this with any sort of entitlement or feeling that anyone owes me something. Quite the contrary. However, I do think there are some basic improvements that could be made that would hugely help people get up and get going with ActiveScaffold. 1. if configuration is needed for an option, don't include it in the defaults. Don't make me think about search when I may not even want it. Don't make me add in other methods, routes, links, or whatever if I just want to get a simple scaffolding view of some models going. It's so much better to opt-in to the more advanced capabilities once ready than force them on a user to start with. 2. A certain amount of configuration is acceptable of course. For instance, adding in include helpers, changing things like what js framework to use, etc. makes a lot of sense to me. I still don't like having to do that sort of thing each time I want to generate a new idea, so I've wrapped it up in a rails 3 compatible recipe in a project of mine, which you can see here: http://github.com/jackdempsey/beet/blob/master/lib/beet/recipes/rails3/admin_interface/active_scaffold.rb The line I would draw though is using beet to setup config options in a controller to exclude search and so on as a default. I really think that should be the default choice from the lib itself. 3. If certain choices remain standard, then it'd be great to have a small section of "this is what you need to do to get going", showing configs for search, how to setup edit_associated urls, and other things like that. There may very well be this sort of page out there, but I couldn't find it, and gave up after a good amount of searching. The reason I'm so frustrated is that this project is so close to being something amazingly useful for me and I imagine many others, but these first stumbling steps were almost enough to make me want to quit trying and not look back, and that would be a shame. I'm not one to complain and expect others to code for me. I'd be happy to help document things (once I understand them better) and engage in a discussion about defaults, how easy it should or shouldn't be to get up and running, etc. At this point though I don't want to jump back in without a better sense of hope that each new thing I try to do won't be broken to start, and force me to scour pages looking for a fix. Is Thank you for the time, effort, and consideration put into AS. I truly appreciate it and hope I can help with improving it even more. best, Jack -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ActiveScaffold : Ruby on Rails plugin" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/activescaffold?hl=en.
