title: Customizing controller actions

When you install Administrate into your app, we generate empty controllers for each of your resources. If you want to create more complex application behavior for a dashboard, you can overwrite controller actions.

The generated controller will look something like:

# app/controllers/admin/foos_controller.rb

class Admin::FoosController < Admin::ApplicationController

  # Overwrite any of the RESTful controller actions to implement custom behavior
  # For example, you may want to send an email after a foo is updated.
  #
  # def update
  #   foo = Foo.find(params[:id])
  #   foo.update(params[:foo])
  #   send_foo_updated_email
  # end

  # Override this method to specify custom lookup behavior.
  # This will be used to set the resource for the `show`, `edit`, and `update`
  # actions.
  #
  # def find_resource(param)
  #   Foo.find_by!(slug: param)
  # end

  # Override this if you have certain roles that require a subset
  # this will be used to set the records shown on the `index` action.
  #
  # def scoped_resource
  #  if current_user.super_admin?
  #    resource_class
  #  else
  #    resource_class.with_less_stuff
  #  end
  # end
end

Customizing Actions

To disable certain actions globally, you can disable their routes in config/routes.rb, using the usual Rails facilities for this. For example:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  # ...
  namespace :admin do
    # ...

    # Payments can only be listed or displayed
    resources :payments, only: [:index, :show]
  end
end

Customizing Default Sorting

To set the default sorting on the index action you could override default_sorting_attribute or default_sorting_direction in your dashboard controller like this:

def default_sorting_attribute
  :age
end

def default_sorting_direction
  :desc
end

Customizing Redirects after actions

To set custom redirects after the actions create, update and destroy you can override after_resource_created_path, after_resource_updated_path or after_resource_destroyed_path like this:

    def after_resource_destroyed_path(_requested_resource)
      { action: :index, controller: :some_other_resource }
    end

    def after_resource_created_path(requested_resource)
      [namespace, requested_resource.some_other_resource]
    end

    def after_resource_updated_path(requested_resource)
      [namespace, requested_resource.some_other_resource]
    end