How do I selectively turn off template caching in Rails?

Question

I am sending emails in a background job using ActionMailer. Users can create new email templates but they aren't recognized until the background job is restarted. Used to use

ActionView::TemplateFinder.reload!

which forced reloading of templates (now deprecated on 2.3.4). I have tried

ActionView::Base.cache_template_loading = false

but that does not work.

Answer 1

What I wound up doing was setting a global variable in my background process before the Rails environment was loaded:

$background = true

then in environments/production.rb:

config.action_view.cache_template_loading = !$background

Not thrilled, but it works. I get template reloading for email templates in my background job but cached view templates for the online application.

Answer 2

Since your users can create (and possibly change) templates, why don't you store them on the database and render as inline erb?

render :inline => template_record.contents

Now that I suggested this, I noticed... You can also use :inline to manually read the template and pass it to ActionView. You'll have to handle the exceptional case of the template not existing, though.

render :inline => File.read( ... )