Including controllers within a controller

Not entirely sure if that spells out what I am trying to do.

So I am using (active) scaffolds for administration of the website. I
have 4 controllers that are working well to administer their respective
tables in the database using active scaffolds.

What I would like to do and I am having a time getting it to work is to
have a single admin page that will call all of these controller into one
page ( I would imagine we would call this includes).

I am not sure if that is how it is suppose to be done in rails but
essentially I want one page where I can CRUD pages, users, categories,
etc.

Active scaffolds is a pretty nice tool that will please the end-user
admin and it would please me if they can administer their entire site in
one convenient page.

Can I do this and if so how?

Joel S. wrote:

What I would like to do and I am having a time getting it to work is to
have a single admin page that will call all of these controller into one
page ( I would imagine we would call this includes).

It sounds like what you want is to use one of the admin page’s layouts
and update it with, say, a sidebar containing the choices and yielding
into the main part of the page. Then set this to be the layout for all
your admin controllers.

Mark B. wrote:

Joel S. wrote:

What I would like to do and I am having a time getting it to work is to
have a single admin page that will call all of these controller into one
page ( I would imagine we would call this includes).

It sounds like what you want is to use one of the admin page’s layouts
and update it with, say, a sidebar containing the choices and yielding
into the main part of the page. Then set this to be the layout for all
your admin controllers.

Mark,

Yes that would work, and perhaps that might be what I should do.

I was more in particular thinking of this:
http://www.activescaffold.com/tutorials/embedded
as I use active scaffolds for my project.

Unfortunately I am receiving the error “undefined method `render’ for
PageController:Class”.

Now, maybe the reason I am getting this error is a due to a lack of
understanding. I am imagining what this is suppose to do is allow me to
have all of my different scaffold controllers viewed under one page i.e.
admin page.

Any ideas?

Joel S. wrote:

I was more in particular thinking of this:
http://www.activescaffold.com/tutorials/embedded
as I use active scaffolds for my project.

This allows you to create multiple views of a single controller action
on the page.

Now, maybe the reason I am getting this error is a due to a lack of
understanding. I am imagining what this is suppose to do is allow me to
have all of my different scaffold controllers viewed under one page i.e.
admin page.

Whatever scaffolding mechanism you use and whatever way you implement
your controllers, the bottom line is that the URL requested gets put
through the routing engine which causes a single action of a single
controller to be called with a set of parameters. The result is that
some text may or may not get created (rendered) and sent back for the
user to see. The action may call another action to do the work and it
may send back a redirect causing the browser to ask for another URL, but
this is the gist of it.

The general scheme of the resultant text is that a view is rendered
(with the above embedded example, multiple renderings can be performed)
and then a layout is rendered (unless specifically prevented) with the
view text placed where there is a call to “yield”. Thus, the user sees a
layout with part of that layout created by the rendering for a single
controller action.

If you want to present the user with several choices of things to do,
add them to the layout. If you want a single user request to do several
things and return all the results, then you need a single controller
action to coordinate getting all the data together and arranging for the
view to be rendered.

The embedded scaffold example seems to be using “render” in the view in
a similar manner in which you might normally call multiple partials in a
view, but I haven’t played with this so don’t know the internals of what
is going on there.