ActionMailer - ROR Recipes - Multipart/alternative

Rails
1

I am using the SaltedHashLoginGenerator. and would like to send the
e-mail in multipart/alternative format.

By default my application is using forgot_password_en.rhtml template.

I read in the ROR Recipes book

“ActionMailer sees these templates, recognizes the pattern in their
file names, and automatically sets the MIME type of the message to
multipart/alternative and adds each rendered view with the content
type
in its file name.”

So I created forgot_password_en.text.plain.rhtml template and
forgot_password_en.text.html.rhtml templates (and removed the
forgot_password_en.rhtml template temporarily).

Now my application won’t send any email.

How can I make ActionMailer recognize these templates and set the
appropriate MIMe type?

My mailer function looks like this:

def forgot_password(member, url=nil)
  setup_email(member)

  # Email header info
  @subject += "Forgotten password notification"

  # Email body substitutions
  @body["name"] = "#{member.firstname} #{member.lastname}"
  @body["login"] = member.login
  @body["url"] = url || MemberSystem::CONFIG[:app_url].to_s
  @body["app_name"] = MemberSystem::CONFIG[:app_name].to_s
end

Thanks for your assistance.
Frank

2

On 2/6/06, softwareengineer 99 [email protected] wrote:

multipart/alternative and adds each rendered view with the content type

@body["name"] = "#{member.firstname} #{member.lastname}"
@body["login"] = member.login
@body["url"] = url || MemberSystem::CONFIG[:app_url].to_s
@body["app_name"] = MemberSystem::CONFIG[:app_name].to_s

end

Hi Frank.

Would this work if your templates weren’t called “_en”? I believe
ActionMailer requires the template to be named exactly the same as the
mailer’s method (forgot_password) with the remaining dot-separated parts
of
the name representing the mime type and template type (eg .rhtml).

So if you rename your templates to, for example,
forgot_password.text.plain.rhtml does your mailer start working again?

–
Chad F.
http://chadfowler.com
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_rr/ (Rails Recipes - In Beta!)
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/mjwti/ (My Job Went to India, and
All
I Got Was This Lousy Book)
http://rubycentral.org
http://rubygarden.org
http://rubygems.rubyforge.org (over one million gems served!)

3

Chad F. wrote:

Would this work if your templates weren’t called “_en”? I believe
ActionMailer requires the template to be named exactly the same as the
mailer’s method (forgot_password) with the remaining dot-separated parts
of the name representing the mime type and template type (eg .rhtml).

So if you rename your templates to, for example,
forgot_password.text.plain.rhtml does your mailer start working again?

I used SHLG and it generated a “forgot_password” method in my
MemberNotify ActionMailer
subclass and a “forgot_password_en.html” view. That all appears to work.

Sorry I can’t offer any insight on why things aren’t working – I’m
still very new to all
this – but I thought I should point out that the “_en” isn’t breaking
mine. I’m fairly
certain that’s added by the Localization plugin.

b

4

Hello Chad,
Thank you for your reply. I will certainly follow your tip and post
the results here. It sounds like it should work, but I will let you
know.

Thanks
Frank

Chad F. [email protected] wrote:
Hi Frank.

Would this work if your templates weren’t called “_en”? I believe
ActionMailer requires the template to be named exactly the same as
the mailer’s method (forgot_password) with the remaining dot-separated
parts of the name representing the mime type and template type (eg
.rhtml).

So if you rename your templates to, for example,
forgot_password.text.plain.rhtml does your mailer start working again?

–
Chad F.
http://chadfowler.com
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_rr/ (Rails Recipes - In Beta!)
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/mjwti/ (My Job Went to India,
and All I Got Was This Lousy Book)
http://rubycentral.org
http://rubygarden.org
http://rubygems.rubyforge.org (over one million gems served!)

Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails

5

On 2/7/06, Ben M. [email protected] wrote:

I used SHLG and it generated a “forgot_password” method in my MemberNotify ActionMailer
subclass and a “forgot_password_en.html” view. That all appears to work.

Sorry I can’t offer any insight on why things aren’t working – I’m still very new to all
this – but I thought I should point out that the “_en” isn’t breaking mine. I’m fairly
certain that’s added by the Localization plugin.

Yea, my bet is (I don’t know the localization plugin well) that the
localization plugin overrides the view-finding logic in a way that
doesn’t affect the hardcoded checks that happen in the ActionMailer
code. It might be worth a patch to ActionMailer to make it more
flexible if that’s the case (or maybe not).

–
Chad F.
http://chadfowler.com
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_rr/ (Rails Recipes - In Beta!)
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/mjwti/ (My Job Went to India,
and All I Got Was This Lousy Book)
http://rubycentral.org
http://rubygarden.org
http://rubygems.rubyforge.org (over one million gems served!)

6

On 2/7/06, softwareengineer 99 [email protected] wrote:

EOL

I commented the entire code out, restarted the server and tried again and
voila!, it worked.

I’m not surprised. Thanks for posting your findings.

figure it out)
3. How to specify content type of text/html without using multipart for
SLHG (by using @content_type=“text/html”)

Thanks for your suggestions.

The SLHG works great, though it does takes some time. I have finally
integrated it and recommend that it be added to the recipes also. The
documentation that comes with SLHG is pretty self explanatory but can be
overwhelming.

What editor did you use to compose the book? Docbook or something else?

I’m using the Pragmatic Programmers’ proprietary (and absolutely
amazing!) publishing system. All of the writing is done in XML.

Thank you once again for your assistance and great tips.

Thanks!

–
Chad F.
http://chadfowler.com
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_rr/ (Rails Recipes - In Beta!)
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/mjwti/ (My Job Went to India,
and All I Got Was This Lousy Book)
http://rubycentral.org
http://rubygarden.org
http://rubygems.rubyforge.org (over one million gems served!)

7

Dear Chad,

Thank you for your assistance.

I tried renaming as per your suggestion and tried resending email but
the email delivery failed.

Then I looked in the localization code and found the following code in
lib/localization.rb which is responsible for adding the _en to the
template name:

# redefinition of ActionMail::Base#render_message, that adds locale

suffix to
# the template name
ActionMailer::Base.module_eval <<-EOL
private
def render_message(method_name, body)
initialize_template_class(body).render_file(method_name +
“_#{CONFIG[:default_language]}”)
end
EOL

I commented the entire code out, restarted the server and tried again
and voila!, it worked.

My forgot password message arrived with content-type set to:

multipart/alternative;
boundary=mimepart_43e8db39b433c_1a4a…fdbaf1bcc3c9

Seeing how many folks are using SLHG, I highly recommend the addition
of following tips as the addition of these will highly benefit your
readers:

  1. How to modify the above code to keep the localization but still be
    able to use multi-part messages.
  2. How to specify a reply_to address for ActionMailer. (I still cannot
    figure it out)
  3. How to specify content type of text/html without using multipart
    for SLHG (by using @content_type=“text/html”)

The SLHG works great, though it does takes some time. I have finally
integrated it and recommend that it be added to the recipes also. The
documentation that comes with SLHG is pretty self explanatory but can
be overwhelming.

What editor did you use to compose the book? Docbook or something
else?

Thank you once again for your assistance and great tips.

Frank
Ruby Gemologist
P.S. I recommend that all Ruby developers be officially called Ruby
gemologists to stand out from the rest.

Chad F. [email protected] wrote: On 2/7/06, Ben M. wrote:

I used SHLG and it generated a “forgot_password” method in my MemberNotify ActionMailer
subclass and a “forgot_password_en.html” view. That all appears to work.

Sorry I can’t offer any insight on why things aren’t working – I’m still very new to all
this – but I thought I should point out that the “_en” isn’t breaking mine. I’m fairly
certain that’s added by the Localization plugin.

Yea, my bet is (I don’t know the localization plugin well) that the
localization plugin overrides the view-finding logic in a way that
doesn’t affect the hardcoded checks that happen in the ActionMailer
code. It might be worth a patch to ActionMailer to make it more
flexible if that’s the case (or maybe not).

–
Chad F.
http://chadfowler.com
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_rr/ (Rails Recipes - In Beta!)
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/mjwti/ (My Job Went to India,
and All I Got Was This Lousy Book)
http://rubycentral.org
http://rubygarden.org
http://rubygems.rubyforge.org (over one million gems served!)