Rails: Custom template for email "deliver_" method?

Question

I'm building an email system that stores my different emails in the database and calls the appropriate "deliver_" method via method_missing (since I can't explicitly declare methods since they're user-generated).

My problem is that my rails app still tries to render the template for whatever the generated email is, though those templates don't exist. I want to force all emails to use the same template (views/test_email.html.haml), which will be setup to draw their formatting from my database records.

How can I accomplish this? I tried adding render :template => 'test_email' in the test_email method in emailer_controller with no luck.

---

models/emailer.rb:

class Emailer < ActionMailer::Base

  def method_missing(method, *args)
    # not been implemented yet
    logger.info "method missing was called!!"
  end

end

controller/emailer_controller.rb:

class EmailerController < ApplicationController

  def test_email
    @email = Email.find(params[:id])
    Emailer.send("deliver_#{@email.name}")
  end

end

views/emails/index.html.haml:

%h1 Listing emails
%table{ :cellspacing => 0 }
  %tr
    %th Name
    %th Subject
  - @emails.each do |email| 
    %tr
      %td=h email.name
      %td=h email.subject
      %td= link_to 'Show', email
      %td= link_to 'Edit', edit_email_path(email)
      %td= link_to 'Send Test Message', :controller => 'emailer', :action => 'test_email', :params => { :id => email.id }
      %td= link_to 'Destroy', email, :confirm => 'Are you sure?', :method => :delete
%p= link_to 'New email', new_email_path

Error I'm getting with the above:

Template is missing

Missing template emailer/name_of_email_in_database.erb in view path app/views

Answer 1

Try multipart may that work

  def test_email
    @email = Email.find(params[:id])
    Emailer.send("deliver_#{@email.name}")
    part :content_type => 'multipart/alternative' do |copy|
      copy.part :content_type => 'text/plain' do |plain|
        plain.body = render( :file => "conta.text.plain.erb",  :email=>@email )
      end
      copy.part :content_type => 'text/html' do |html|
        html.body = render( :file => "conta.text.html.erb",  :email => @email )
      end
    end
  end

Answer 2

Aph, I feel silly. I figured it out:

models/emailer.rb:

class Emailer < ActionMailer::Base

  def method_missing(method, *args)
    logger.info "method missing was called!!"
    recipients  "Test <[email protected]>" 
    body        "#{ Email.find_by_name(method.to_s).body }"
  end

end

Since the incoming method is basically the name of the record, I can pull the body content stored in the database directly and pass that in as the body of the email, bypassing the templates altogether.

Answer 3

I'd go "up a level"

In other words, use the same view for everyone's email. But in the view, render different text depending on the user_id.

Remember that the view can call the render method.

In my case, I let users upload email templates using the liquid template system. (Google for rails liquid templates.) Using liquid is good since it is safe--users can't include arbitrary ruby code in their templates.

Then my email view renders the liquid template and the customized email is thereby generated.