emailing a page that already exists

Question

I'm looking at this tutorial http://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailer_basics.html and I get why it would send the html page that is in the view. However how do I send a page that already exists before I created the mailer? I don't want to copy the html and the ruby code over because I don't want another copy of that code to have to maintain.

The page I want to email is an announcements page and there is already another view for the announcements page since it is accessible from other parts of the site.

Answer 1

You can pass :template_path and :template_name hash keys to the specific method in your mailer as in:

mail(:to => user.email,
         :subject => "Subject",
         :template_path => 'announcements',
         :template_name => 'index')

In this case it will look for templates at app/views/announcements with name index.