Rails 3 - ActiveAdmin - displaying an ActiveRecord object instead of text

Question

I currently have a Rails 3.0.10 application, and I have created two models with simple associations: has_many and belongs_to.

After installing the ActiveAdmin plugin and creating the appropriate Ruby resource files, I noticed some strange behavior.

Below you can see that the “Job File” belongs to “for Ernet Clients”. All associations work correctly, but the display name appears as the actual ActiveRecord instead of the client name.

This is a view view when in the "Job File" section:

But if I move on to viewing the actual client, the correct text will appear:

There must be something wrong with the Job File resource that causes it, but I can’t understand what it can be. After googling, I found this: http://groups.google.com/group/activeadmin/browse_thread/thread/2a261e070efa7bae

In JobFile.register, I specified the display name as follows:

filter :ernet_client, :display_name_methods => :display_name 

This did not work, and I went through all the other available names to no avail.

I was looking for ActiveAdmin and sass-rails dependencies, it seems the only one - but that is if you are using 3.1 and I am using Rails 3.0.10.

And finally, to make sure my associations really work, I opened the Rails console and created a job file:

 job = JobFile.new => #<JobFile hash returned> job.ernet_client_id = 2 => 2 job.ernet_client.client_name => Target 

Everything seems to work as it should.

Does anyone know how to solve this?

Answer 1

Have you tried to define the to_s method in the ErnetClient model?

 def to_s display_name end 

It looks like this is a method that is called automatically, as if you typed to_s on one of these objects in the console, you would get a similar result.

Answer 2

Here you can find an explanation Filter select show object instead of object name .

 # Active Admin makes educated guesses when displaying objects, this is the list of methods it tries calling in order setting :display_name_methods, [ :display_name, :full_name, :name, :username, :login, :title, :email, :to_s ] 

You can define display_name , full_name or ... (see list above) ... method in your model. ActiveAdmin is looking for one of them.