Rails + Active Admin: Display name

Question

I am using Active Admin with Ruby on Rails and I am having an issue with the way that some models are shown in the panel.

Taking the class User as an example, if I do not define any method to display it friendly, I see #<User:00000006b47868>. So Active Admin suggests implementing a method to specify, for each class, how to show it.

According to the documentation (http://activeadmin.info/docs/3-index-pages/index-as-table.html), Active Admin looks for one of these methods to guess what to display, in the following order:

:display_name, :full_name, :name, :username, :login, :title, :email, :to_s

So having this method within the User class would solve the problem:

def display_name
  return self.id.to_s + '-' + self.full_name
end

However, before using Active Admin, I was already using the method display_name with other purposes (for example, in views) in order to show the user name in a friendly way, and I do not want to show the same in Active Admin panel.

I cannot change the name of the method because I use display_name in a lot of files along the project, and changing it would probably introduce bugs in the application.

An ideal solution for this case would be to have something like an active_admin_name method that is used by Active Admin to show models in its panel. So the question is:

Is there any way to have a method that is called by Active Admin instead of display_name? For example, to result in the following order:

:active_admin_name, :display_name, :full_name, :name, :username, :login, :title, :email, :to_s

I have searched in Active Admin documentation and in config/initializers/active_admin.rb, but I could not find a way to do it.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Try

ActiveAdmin.setup do |config|    
  config.display_name_methods = [:active_admin_name, :display_name ...]
end

You can find this setting in lib/active_admin/application.rb