How do I attach a rendered .pdf to an email in Rails?

Question

My application creates a .pdf file when it is rendered by passing it to the URL (for example, domain.com/letter/2.pdf)

It doesn't get saved anywhere.

How can I make that actual pdf an attachment in an outbound email.

Here is my mailer:

  def campaign_email(contact,email)
    subject    email.subject
    recipients contact.email
    from       'Me <[email protected]>'
    sent_on    Date.today

    body       :email => email
  end

Answer 1

Here's an example for rails 2

class ApplicationMailer < ActionMailer::Base
# attachments
def signup_notification(recipient, letter)
  recipients      recipient.email_address_with_name
  subject         "New account information"
  from            "[email protected]"

  attachment :content_type => "image/jpeg",
    :body => File.read("an-image.jpg")

  attachment "application/pdf" do |a|
    a.body = letter
  end
end
end

in your view or wherever your calling your method:

ApplicationMailer.deliver_signup_notification(letter)

Answer 2

one quick an easy solution would be fetch the url content using net/http and open-uri, to get the attachment

attachments['free_book.pdf'] = open("http://#{request.host}/letter/#{id}.pdf")

eg:

def campaign_email(contact,email)
    subject    email.subject
    recipients contact.email
    attachments['free_book.pdf'] = open("http://#{request.host}/letter/#{id}.pdf")
    from       'Me <[email protected]>'
    sent_on    Date.today

    body       :email => email
end

or, call the PDF generation inside your mailer controller action