evolving the web…

When working on a large Rails project, it can be a kludge having the mailers present among the views and other model files. A nice technique to clean up things is to put all the mailers and associated views in the same folder. If you don’t know about this technique then go read it first, and then come back here.

The benefit of having the ApplicationMailer is that you can define the host for the mailers, include ActionController::UrlWriter, other setup methods in a single file and have all the mailers inherit them.

The patch written for action mailer to not use layouts for text/plain email was causing problem with exception notification plugin, so I have modified it slightly so that it checks whether the file parameter passed to it responds to content_type or not.

Further to clean things up this patch can be moved to ApplicationMailer to ensure that it is only applied for all our mailers and not for other mailers which may be used elsewhere.

Update: The code given below here causes the exception notification plugin to stop working, get the fixed code from this post. It also contains a better technique to organize the mailers.

Rails 2.2 has added a very cool new feature which allows the use of layouts for mailer-templates, just like the way layouts can be used for views. This is great, but there is one gotcha, when you try sending a multi-part email (both text and html, as you should be), it wraps the mail content with the same layout for both the text/plain version and the text/html version.

After digging around a bit in the ActionMailer code, I came up with the following monkey patch, which will use the layout only for the text/html version of the email. You can put this code in your environment.rb file, it won’t use layout when the mail-template content type is ‘text/plain’.

If you can come up with some other better solution than this, then let us know.