ActiveMailer

Introduction goes here.

DHH thinks this is a bad idea and he’s wrong. Email needs to have somewhere to put the business logic surrounding it, and the controller is not the place for that. www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2009/11/16/sending-email-controllers-versus-models twitter.com/dhh/status/5769040367 twitter.com/dhh/status/5769698185 www.loudthinking.com/posts/43-think-of-emails-as-views-delivered-through-smtp

Installation

1) script/plugin install git://github.com/expectedbehavior/active_mailer.git

2) Make the tables for the classes that ActiveMailer uses to store the people you send email to. There’s no need to make the models; those are included with the plugin.

class CreateActiveMailerTables < ActiveRecord::Migration

def self.up
  create_table :email_users do |t|
    t.string :email_address
    t.timestamps
  end

  create_table :email_user_associations do |t|
    t.references :email_user
    t.string :emailable_type
    t.integer :emailable_id
    t.timestamps
  end
end

def self.down
  drop_table :email_users
  drop_table :email_user_associations
end

end

Basic Usage

There’s no generator yet (high on the list of things to do). In the mean time, making a new ActiveMailer class can be done like this.

1) script/generate model FooEmail # or whatever you want to call your email

2) Open up the FooEmail model and change “ActiveRecord::Base” to “ActiveMailer::Base”

3) Open up the FooEmail migration and use “create_active_mailer_table” instead of the usual “create_table”.

# sample active mailer migration class CreateFooEmail < ActiveRecord::Migration

def self.up
  create_active_mailer_table :foo_emails do |t|
    t.integer :registration_id
    t.string  :kind
    t.timestamps
  end
end

def self.down
  drop_table :foo_emails
end

end

4) Make the template for your email (in this case called ‘foo_email.rb’) in app/views/active_mailer/base/default_action_mailer

At this point, there’s no need to do any more. You can send your email by making an object, setting the appropriate details, and calling send.

> f = FooEmail.new(:subject => “My Awesome Email”, :sender => “[email protected]”, :recipients => “[email protected]”)

> #<FooEmail id: nil, blahblahblah>

> f.send!

> true

More Advanced Usage

If your email is always going to have the same subject, sender, bcc, etc, then you can always set those things in the mail object. Remember that it’s really just an ActiveRecord object, so you can do anything in this class you can do in ActiveRecord. Here’s an example of using ActiveRecord associations to make sure there’s a user for the email. It also includes setting the subject and sender by default.

class BeerEmail < ActiveMailer::Base

belongs_to :user

validates_presence_of :user

def after_initialize
  self.subject = "It's Beer O'Clock"
  self.sender  = "[email protected]"
end

end

Contributing

Bugs/Feature www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/14211

Authors

Matt Gordon