Admin Menu for apps based on Curation Concerns

Administration Menu for Apps using Curation Concerns Engine

Audience: Developers

Development Area: Apps using Curation Concerns engine

By default, to view the admin menu, click the user name and select Admin Dashboard. This comes from the curation concerns UI. Your app may have modified this.

Access to admin dashboard

The admin dashboard requires admin access with cancan abilities can :read, :admin_dashboard

Run the AdminDashboard Generator

If you have just run the sufia generator for the first time this step is unnecessary. To get the CurationConcerns::AdminController in your app run:

rails generate curation_concerns:admin_dashboard

You should see a file in app/controllers/curation_concerns/admin_controller.rb

Adding new admin menu items

Steps to add a new menu item in the left hand menu of the Administration Menu.

Understanding the configuration file

Edit lib/curation_concerns/configuration.rb

Example configuration with one menu item.

    def dashboard_configuration
      @dashboard_configuration ||= {
        menu: {
          index: {}
        },
        actions: {
          index: {
            partials: [
              "total_example",
              "total_objects",
              "total_objects_pie"
            ]
          }
        },
        data_sources: {
          resource_stats: CurationConcerns::ResourceStatisticsSource
        }
      }
    end

Menu items appear in the left hand side by adding a menu and defining its action. In the above example, there is a single left hand menu item defined by menu -> index with action -> index.

There is a default controller method that will drive the rendering of left hand menu items and their content.
The code for it lives in app/controllers/concerns/curation_concerns/admin_controller_behavior.rb #index

The index method will render app/views/curation_concerns/admin/index.html.erb which will in turn render each of the partials listed for the action under actions -> index -> partials.

You won't be changing the index method. It is mentioned here for reference only to understand the processing that is happening.

data_sources allows you to identify a class to provide data for use in the partials.

Add a simple menu item

1. Create a partial to render as the content: Add file: app/views/curation_concerns/admin/_hi_there.html.erb

<h1>Hi There</h1>

2. Create/modify configuration: File: config/initializers/curation_concerns.rb

You will either need to copy the entire configuration from Curation Concerns lib/curation_concerns/configuration.rb or update the components of the hash created in Curation Concerns to get the menu items defined there. Below is an example of updating the hash.

menu -> hello_world puts hello_world on the left side admin menu actions -> hello_world tells default #index method which partials to show in the content

  config.dashboard_configuration[:menu][:hello_world] = {}
  config.dashboard_configuration[:actions][:hello_world] = { partials: ['hi_there'] }
  # config.dashboard_configuration[:data_sources][:user_data] = { MyApp::UserDataSource }  # This example doesn't use a datasource

3. Add new route for action that sends it to the index action for processing. Add each menu route in the admin namespace.

  CurationConcerns::Engine.routes.draw do
    namespace :admin do
      get :hello_world
    end
  end

4. Add language translation for the text that will appear in the left hand admin menu.

Edit file config/locales/curation_concerns.en.yml

en:
  curation_concerns:
    dashboard:
      menu:
        hello_world:  Hello World

5. Create app/controllers/curation_concerns/admin_controller.rb

module CurationConcerns
  class AdminController < ApplicationController
    include CurationConcerns::AdminControllerBehavior
  end
end

Optional: Remove custom search builders. As an example, Sufia has customized search builder which had to be removed from the admin dashboard processing. The following demonstrates the code to remove it that is placed in the AdminController class.

    def search_builder
      super.except(:add_advanced_parse_q_to_solr)
    end

6. Test in the browser at http://localhost:3000/admin

Click Hello World. admin_controller_behavior.rb #index in Curation Concerns engine will render the partial _hi_there and you will see content Hi There.