Did I do this correctly - Call an action from controller with link_to

Question

Please excuse the simplicity and length of this, but I have a little test app that has a users table, with name, email, and salary attributes. I created a mailer that will send out a report of this data to a specific user at my discretion, in other words, when I click a button. My button is created using link_to, and calls an action in my main users_controller, which then calls the mailer action. (I hope that just made sense). It looks like the following and is working just as I hoped; I'm just looking to know if this is the right way to do something like this:

In my users_controller (created by the scaffold generator):

def sendemail  
@user = User.find(params[:id])  
UserMailer.welcome_email(@user).deliver  
redirect_to user_path(@user)  
flash[:notice] = 'Email has been sent!'  
end  

In the user_mailer.rb file:

def welcome_email(user)
@user = user
@url  = "http://example.com/login"
mail(:to => user.email,
     :subject => "Welcome to My Awesome Site")
end

In the User's show.html.erb page, this is how the email gets sent:

<%= link_to "Send Email", sendemail_user_path(@user) %>

In my routes.rb file, so that everything executes properly (which it does):

resources :users do 
member do 
get 'sendemail'
end

So, having said all this, it works just like it should. I click on the user's show.html.erb page where I would have the data and charts that I want to eventually display, and at my discretion, I can kick out an email to that user with this data, or whatever I put in the mailer.html.erb file. When it is sent, it flashes the message I specified in the controller, and leaves me on that page, just as I specified; so it's working. I just want to know, is this the right and most ruby/railsy way to do things?

Answer 1

This code looks very similar to the Rails Guides Action Mailer example, so suffice it to say you are creating railsy code.

Also, if your application evolved into a much grander scale you would want to consider delivering emails via a background job to avoid email deliveries from blocking the current thread.

Otherwise the code looks great. Of course, you would most likely send an email after doing something successful in a controller, rather than have a dedicated action for emailing directly. For instance, you might have a welcome action that sends an email on a successful user record save.