Class to manage e-mail from iPhone

Question

I'm working on an iPhone app that offers the user the opportunity to send an e-mail in 3 different places in the app, and for 3 different purposes.

Rather than put the same code for showing the e-mail composer in 3 different view controllers, shouldn't I develop a separate E-mail class, create an instance, and then set properties such as To, CC, BCC, Body, HTML_Or_Not, and so on?

Also, if I create an instance of such a class, and it brings up the e-mail composer, is it OK to release the class even before the e-mail composer has left the screen?

Answer 1

My advice, It's so easy to use the built in mail picker class, just stick with it, you can create a function to setup and show the picker, and use that when you need to like so:

- (void)showMailPicker {
 if ([MFMailComposeViewController canSendMail]) {
  MFMailComposeViewController *picker = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init];
    picker.mailComposeDelegate = self;
   picker.navigationBar.barStyle = UIBarStyleBlack;

  [picker setToRecipients: ...];

  [picker setSubject:@"Title"];

  // Fill out the email body text
  NSString *emailBody = @"email Body...";
  [picker setMessageBody:emailBody isHTML:NO];

  [self presentModalViewController:picker animated:YES];
  [picker release];
 }
}

Yes, it's safe to release the picker once you have presented it, and remember that once you present the picker, you can't change the email addresses, subject, body etc...

Answer 2

My aproach would me to encapsulate the whole process of creating, initialising, displaying, dismissing and handling all of the aspects of the mail composer in a class, like a "mail manager" or something.

Then you can create and instance and set the properties you need, and then call "show mail composer" or something to that effect.

I wouldn't recommend releasing this manager class if it will be dealing with the dismissal and handling of the result of the mail composer (ie, handling an error when sending) until after it has finished what it's doing. If you release it too early, you may not have any logical way to dismiss the mail composer or gracefully handle it's results etc.