Deleting Attachments with rails_admin

If you want to be able to delete an attachment or a file upload associated with rails_admin you can by making some pretty tiny changes to your model.

The first thing you want to do is let your model know there is a parameter it wants to look for, this parameter should be named :delete_#{name_of_attachment}, for example;

attr_accessor :delete_attachment

Next up we need to set up something to catch this being set by rails_admin and handle it appropriately. You can do this with one line;

before_validation { attachment.clear if delete_attachment == '1' }

The attachment.clear is how paperclip deals with items to be removed, but you can change this to whatever you want.

Thats it! Unfortunately I couldn’t find this documented anywhere so it took me longer than I would care to admit.