Rails Active Admin - Edit/create association on show page?

Question

I have a show page for an author that lists the authors books. I'd like to be able to add a book name in line to quickly add a new book association. I could do it pretty easily with rails MVC on the front end, but I am having a hard time undertsanding the activeadmin DSL to do things that are not quite out of the box.

Here's the current table of data on the show page, straight-forward.

    show :title => :name do
        panel "Books" do
            table_for(author.books) do 
                column("Book") { |book| link_to book.name.titleize, admin_book_path(book) }
                column("Release") { |book| book.release_date.to_formatted_s(:long_ordinal)}
                column("Sales") { |book| book.orders.count }
            end
        end
    end

What I would like to see is at the bottom of the list a blank textfield that I can input a new book title and click ADD to add it to the list. But I only see info in the docs on how to edit the form itself, which gets shown only on the edit page.

Overall I love how quickly activeadmin sets up, but it feels like I'm missing some basic concepts of how it functions, and the docs aren't helping me grasp it...

Answer 1

You could for example render a from as a partial in the Show page and add any needed controller actions to add books and redirect back to Show page.

    row("Add book") do |item|
      div do
        render "form_to_add_books" 
      end

Answer 2

Just use associations in your models and use it like this

form do |f|
  f.inputs do
    f.input :book_name
      f.inputs do
        f.has_many :titles do |p|
           p.input :title
         end  
        end
       end

f.has_many will automatically generates the button.

And don't forget to use

accepts_nested_attributes_for :titles

in your books model.