SchmidtHappens

Have you ever wanted to develop your emails like you do your views in a Rails app? 37signals has a gift for you.

So here's the low down. 37signals have once again come to the rescue with an amazing little gem called MailView. It's fairly straightforward to get set up and I'm going to show you how.

First, you will need a Rails application set up with a functioning mailer class. I'm assuming you are using Rails 3.whatev for this example. You could still be using Rails 2.whatev but you could also still be dragging your knuckles on the ground and chasing after your dinner. Also, this is a tip and not a tutorial (per se) so I won't go into detail on how you create a Rails 3 app with a mailer. So...onto getting things set up.

# in your Gemfile add
  group :development do
    gem 'mail_view'
  end

Then run the bundle install command.

A word of warning, when I first tried this I got an exception about 'tilt' not being found. If you run into the same problem then just modify your Gemfile to include the Tilt gem as well. Apparently, this is a known issue and I'm hoping it will be resolved soon.

Once everything is installed you will need to set up your "preview" class for any mailer you want to view in the browser.

# app/mailers/notifier.rb
  class Notifier < ActionMailer::Base
    def welcome(user)
      #stuff going on in here
    end
  end
  
  # make sure we only load the preview class in development mode
  if Rails.env.development?
    class Notifier::Preview < MailView
      # define a method that will be listed as the "view name" in the browser
      # I just used the same name as the email action from the mailer class
      def welcome
        # you will need to generate any objects that the mail action from your
        # mailer class is expecting.
        user = User.first || User.new(...)
        Notifier.welcome(user)
      end
    end
  end

You will create new methods in the Preview class for any mailer action you want to preview in the browser. Also note that you do not have to call your preview class 'Preview'. You could call it 'MahoganyWood' for all I care, the important thing is that it is a sub-class of MailView. Onto the route!

In your app/config/routes.rb file you will need to "mount" the new preview class you just created.

# app/config/routes.rb
  ...
  # again, making sure we only load this if we are in dev mode
  if Rails.env.development?
    mount Notifier::Preview => 'notifier_preview'
  end

What we just did was create a new "/notifier_preview" path in our app. When you navigate to that url you will be presented with a list of links for each preview action you defined in your preview class. In this example, you would just see a link called "welcome". When you click on the link the html version of the email will be loaded for you to see. Bam!!! If you also created a text version of the email (and of course you did) then you will see a link in the upper right corner labeled "View Text version". Bam again!!!

And there you have it. Pure awesomeness. Now you can develop your emails as if they were just another view in your application. Then, when you are happy with how it is displaying you can send it to different email clients and tweak as necessary.

Something missing? Need more explanation? Let me know in the c-c-c-comments!