How to override value that appears in a dropdown in the rails_admin gem

Question

I have a model UserDelegation that contains:

belongs_to :delegator, :class_name => 'User'#, :conditions => {:order => 'users.last_name ASC, users.first_name ASC'}
belongs_to :delegatee, :class_name => 'User', :touch => true#, :conditions => {:order => 'users.last_name ASC, users.first_name ASC'}

and in my user model i have this:

has_many :delegatees, :through => :user_delegatees, :order => 'users.last_name ASC, first_name ASC'
has_many :delegators, :through => :user_delegators, :order => 'last_name ASC, first_name ASC'

when i am in rails admin and go to the User delegation table and add a new one i get two drop downs which lists the users name. I do know that rails_admin uses name by default when it populates drop downs in associations.

What i am wanting to know is how to override what is displayed in these drop downs so I could for example have it display 'user's name - user's location'?

Answer 1

Change the object_label_method of your User model for rails_admin

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  ...

  rails_admin do
    object_label_method :name_location
  end

  def name_location
    "#{name} - #{location}"
  end
end

Answer 2

Joe Kennedy's answer works perfectly. But when I use

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    rails_admin do
      object_label_method :name_location
    end
  end

the following codes in config/initializers/rails_admin.rb were neglected.

  RailsAdmin.config do |config|
    config.model 'User' do
    ...
    end
  end

So I did

  RailsAdmin.config do |config|
    config.model 'User' do
      object_label_method :name_location
    ...
    end
  end

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    def name_location
      self.name + ' - ' + self.location
    end
  end

and this works.

Answer 3

You will need to specify it in the admin/user_delegation.rb file.

There you will have the fields of your form. Find the drop-down field and modify it:

f.input :your_dropdown_field, :as => :select, :collection => User.all.collect{|u| [u.name.to_s + " - " + u.location.to_s] }

Replace :your_dropdown_field, u.name and u.location with your values.