General Guidance on Rails Mailers

Question

I am making an event registration tool in Rails and I am having trouble working out the mailing section. I am using Mailgun API and I've got a generic "Thank you for Registering" email working when the user signs up as well as a contact form submission that comes to my email. Part of the requirements for the application is the ability to send promotional emails (separate from Thank you for Registering emails). These promotional emails are more like (One week reminder) type emails.

So these emails need to be able to be created by the admin setting up the event as this is a general purpose tool. So to save the emails the admin creates, I have a mailings object. So the relationship is a bit like this:

Event has many mailers, registrations, etc. (and those belong to the event). They are nested resources because they are specific to an event. Now I need to bridge the gap of how to go from the mailers created by the admin to sending them to Mailgun. The problem is we will have to have the ability to add recipients because they may want to send to people besides the registrants for the event. So I need to go from the mailing#show (which shows a preview of the mailing and will need to be able to add/remove recipients), loop through all of the recipients, and send the message that is in the mailing.message field.

I am so close to finishing this tool except for this mailing which I cannot wrap my head around. I see a lot of examples that create a mailer but I am not sure if that would work for me since the message are unique and it needs to get the message and subject from the mailer object. Any advice or guidance? I am really struggling to get this part done.

Answer 1

I assume you have a User model with an email column

I would setup an extra model ie

class PromoMail < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :users # recpients
  validates :body, presence: true
end

Then add a controller, where admins can create these and insert the Mail content in the body field and add recipients.

Then create a new method in your existing mailer to send the mail with the yielded body to one user.

Then add a action to the forementioned controller to send the PromoMail by looping over the associated users and call the ne mailer metod with each.

Answer 2

Couple of steps here, without going into much detail.

1) Make a rake task which looks for any emails which needs to be sent out, and sends them out. You might need to expand your schema to record whether a mail (or mailing or whatever) has been sent already. The rake task itself shouldn't have much code, it should just call a class method in eg User or Mailing or something.

You'll need to think about how the system can decide which emails need to get sent out. I find that flowcharts can be helpful here: it's going to involve iterating over all users, or all mailings, or something, and applying various logical tests to them. You may find that your current schema isn't up to the job, in which case expand it.

2) Schedule this rake task to be run at regular intervals, eg once a day or once a week. Various scheduled task runners are available, eg cron , or if you're on Heroku you'll need to use their Scheduler tool, for example.