Question

I am trying to use the Whenever plugin for rails to perform a model process at certain times. My schedule.rb is as follows:

 every 1.day, :at => '5:30 am' do
    runner "User.mail_out"
  end

My model is as follows:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  acts_as_authentic

  def mail_out

    weekday = Date.today.strftime('%A').downcase

    @users = find(:conditions => "#{weekday}sub = t")

    @users.each { |u| UserMailer.deliver_mail_out(u)}   


  end

end

When I try to run the script/runner -e development “User.mail_out” command, I get the following error:

/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.5/lib/commands/runner.rb:48: undefined method `mail_out' for #<Class:0xb708bd50> (NoMethodError)
    from (eval):1
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `eval'
    from /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.5/lib/commands/runner.rb:48
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
    from script/runner:3

Can anyone point out what is going wrong? Also how can I manually invoke the mail_out process (from command line) to test the functionality of my mailing system.

Thank you!

Answer 1

You’re getting that error because you’ve defined the mail_out method as an instance method instead of a class method. To fix it, change the method definition line to (add self.):

def self.mail_out

To test it from the command line, do something like this:

script/runner "User.mail_out"

You might want to puts or print something so you get some feedback on what happened.