Navigation

You can include/exclude models totally. They won't appear in RailsAdmin at all.

By default, RailsAdmin automatically discovers all the models in the system and adds them to its list of models to be accessible through RailsAdmin.

Disallowlist Approach

The excluded_models configuration above permits the disallowlisting of individual model classes.

config.excluded_models << "ClassName"

Allowlist Approach

If you prefer a allowlist approach, then you can use the included_models configuration option instead:

config.included_models = ["Class1", "Class2", "Class3"]

Only the models explicitly listed will be put under RailsAdmin access, and the auto-discovery of models is skipped.

The disallowlist is effective on top of that, still, so that if you also have:

config.excluded_models = ["Class1"]

then only Class2 and Class3 would be made available to RailsAdmin.

The allowlist approach may be useful if RailsAdmin is used only for a part of the application and you want to make sure that new models are not automatically added to RailsAdmin, e.g. because of security concerns.

Once done with the choice of model, you can customize the way they appear in the navigation.

Static links

Static links can be appended to the main navigation:

config.navigation_static_links = {
  'Google' => 'http://www.google.com'
}

They are displayed in a separate group with default name 'Links', but you can change it:

config.navigation_static_label = "My Links"

Setting the model's label

RailsAdmin will use ActiveModel I18n API by default, so this shouldn't be needed. Still, you can configure label, and its plural, if needed:

config.model 'Box' do
  label "Beautiful box" 
  label_plural "Beautiful boxen"
end

But again, this is way better to do it in config/locale/en.yml:

en:
  ...
  activerecord:
    models:
      box: 
        one: Beautiful box
        other: Beautiful boxen
    attributes:
      box:
        color: "Shade of grey"
        ...

This label will be used anywhere the model name is shown, e.g. on the navigation tabs, Dashboard page, list pages, etc.

Setting the navigation icon

You can set the navigation icon from the bootstrap theme this way :

config.model 'User' do
  navigation_icon 'icon-user'
end

Hiding a model

You can hide a model from the top navigation by marking its visible option as false:

By passing the value as an argument:

config.model 'Team' do
  visible false
end

Or by passing a block that will be lazy evaluated each time the option is read:

config.model 'Team' do
  visible do
    # controller bindings is available here. Example:
    bindings[:controller].current_user.role == :admin
  end
end

These two examples also work as a generic example of how most of the configuration options function within RailsAdmin. You can pass a value as an argument option_name value, or you can pass in a block which will be evaluated each time the option is read. Notable is that boolean options' reader accessors will be appended with ? whereas the writers will not be. That is, if you want to get the Team model's visibility, you use RailsAdmin.config(Team).visible?.

Treeview List

# Given there are the following models: League, Team and Division

config.model 'Team' do
  parent League
end

config.model 'Division' do
  parent League
end

Obtained navigation:

Dashboard
...
League
  Division
  Team
...

Create a navigation_label in navigation

You probably want to change the name of the navigation_label. This can be easily achieved with the 'navigation_label' method of the parent model.

Added to previous example:

config.model 'League' do
  navigation_label 'League related'
end

Obtained navigation:

Dashboard
...
League related  # (non-clickable)
  League
  Division
  Team
...

Change models order in navigation

By default, they are ordered by alphabetical order. If you need to override this, specify a weight attribute. Default is 0. Lower values will bubble items to the top, higher values will move them to the bottom. Items with same weight will still be ordered by alphabetical order. The mechanism is fully compatible with navigation labels. Items will be ordered within their own menu subset (but the parent item will always be first inside this submenu).

Example:

config.model 'League' do
  navigation_label 'League related'
  weight -1
end

The 'League related' navigation label will move to the topmost position.

Method for instances label

Set the method name for instances' label. Will default to the first Config.label_methods (see base configuration) that instances respond to. You can set it explicitly:

config.model 'Team' do
  object_label_method :custom_name_method
end