ActiveAdmin automatically loading full association table

For anyone dealing with this same issue, I finally traced it to the automatically generated sidebar in ActiveAdmin. This includes a search field that includes a select box for all associated records.

If you have an associated table with over a million records like I do AA will happily attempt to insert the entire table into the select box.

The answer was to include some custom filters in the AA definition for products like so:

ActiveAdmin.register Product do
  filter :title
end

That way the association won't be included (unless you specify it yourself.)

A better approach now is to use remove_filter for the particular attribute or relationship:

Or you can also remove a filter and still preserve the default filters:

preserve_default_filters!
remove_filter :id

https://activeadmin.info/3-index-pages.html