Rails 3 and ActiveAdmin: to_s vs. display_name

Question

I'm trying to get my head around Rails and ActiveAdmin, and string representations of objects. Particularly, I'm struggling to define a single method that'll get picked up by Rails (in the templates) and ActiveAdmin.

If I do something like:

def to_s
  "Hello world"
end

Then that works in Rails. But not in ActiveAdmin, which only picks it up if I use display_name . It's solved by doing this:

alias_attribute :to_s, :display_name

But is that a bit hacky? Just wondering if I've missed something obvious. Thanks!

Answer 1

In the end, I used:

def display_name
  "#{name}"
end

Answer 2

What about calling the method something else like

def something
  "Hello World"
end

and then calling...

alias_attribute :something

Perhaps there is a conflict with calling the method to_s in this case?