Improving the Dashboard

In Chapter 6 , you built a rudimentary administrative dashboard that allows the client to manage

categories, products, and other details on the site. In this chapter, you ’ re add some more advanced

functionality to the dashboard and also address some issues that have been lingering in the project.

For example, what happens when you delete a category or product? What do you do about colors

and sizes?

By the end of the chapter, you should have a fully functioning admin panel, with every item from

the current sprint backlog addressed.

Batch Mode Operations

One of the more prominent items on the sprint backlog is allowing Claudia to assign categories

and groupings to her products in batch mode. Access to such a tool would save her a lot of time, as

the only way she can update these settings is by editing one product at a time.

The easiest way to add a batch mode process to the products home view is to make it into a form.

You want to end up with one checkbox per product listing (using the product ID as the value of

each checkbox), a dropdown list for category selection, and a text field that accepts a grouping

string.

Once you have all that in the view, you ’ ll create a specialized function in the products controller

and a corresponding model function that will handle the updates for you. Then, all you have to do

is post the form to that specialized controller function, and you have a batch mode operator!

In the following code, the form elements have been placed inside admin_products_home view.

The bold lines represent new code.