Question

I am integrating a mailing list into an existing CMS in asp.net MVC.

I need to send a confirmation email to the subscriber. Where should I send it from, the controller, Or the service layer?

Clarification: I would definitely create a separate service method called SendConfirmationEmail(). The question is who calls it the controller handling the registration form or the service that added the pending request to the DB?

Obviously I can send it from both but which is proper MVC?

Answer 1

I guess the standard approach is to have an email service that is injected into your controller and the controller only invokes the service operation like _emailService.Enqueue(myMessage).

public class MyController
{
    IEmailService _emailService;

    public MyController(IEmailService emailService)
    {
        _emailService = emailService;
    }

    public ActionResult Email()
    {
        var myMessage = new MyMessage();

        // Initialize message here

        _emailService.Enqueue(myMessage);
        return View();
    }
}

Some of the benefits are:

• reuse : if you need to use the
  email functionality in another
  controller / action
• testability : you can mock the email service in
  unit tests so your tests don’t rely
  on an SMTP server
• you can substitute mailing implementation and instead of sending mail directly queue it for async sending