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Issue created by Administrator@rootContributor

Fields without corresponding model methods and fancier behavior for `Page::Base#get_attribute_value`

Created by: dylnclrk

First off, I'm having a great time using Administrate on a project. Thank you for maintaining such a helpful gem!

What would you like to be able to do? Can you provide some examples?

I have a User model and am hitting an external API to gather some additional information about the user (e.g., to get "badges" assigned to a user). I'd love to show the results of this API call on the admin user show page.

One way to do this is to add a method User#badges that hits our badge API and returns the results. However, I think it would be preferable not to add this method to User, as it won't be used outside of the admin pages. Is there a way to do this?

I'd love to be able to somehow modify the way Page::Base#get_attribute_value works for my User page. Such that, when the attribute in question is :badges, it doesn't end up calling resource.public_send(:badges).

Does this already exist? Am I missing an obvious workaround?

How could we go about implementing that?

Provide a hook in the dashboard like ATTRIBUTE_GETTERS, and change get_attribute_value to first look in ATTRIBUTE_GETTERS before calling resource.public_send(:badges). The values in ATTRIBUTE_GETTERS might be methods with the signature some_getter(resource).

Can you think of other approaches to the problem?

  • I could modify the show page for User, and render the badges in the show template manually, and not treat them as fields.
  • I could also create an Admin::User class that decorates User with the additional fields it needs. But I haven't seen a good pattern for doing this.
  • I could also perhaps modify the User Page, so that it has a custom implementation of #get_attribute_value that knows about the special case for :badges. But I'm not exactly sure how to do this.

Also, FWIW, I'd be happy to take a stab at the ATTRIBUTE_GETTERS implementation if that's something that feels like it's in the spirit of the project, and assuming I haven't missed something obvious (I probably have). But it would probably take me a while.

Thanks again!