Question

I have a Document model with a string column access and a User model with a string column team. In a Document I can enter an array of items for access such as “staff, sales, manager”. Meanwhile, a User has only one item under team.

I am trying to send emails to specific Users based on whether or not for each user.team is included in the array for Document.access.

For example if Document.access = "sales, management", only Users with team = "sales" or team = "management" will be sent the email. Other Users such as team = “accounting” would not.

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Update:

From what I gather on this question, It would appear ActionMailer cannot loop, so I have modified my document_observer. Now that I moved the loop portion out of the mailer, user.email is erroring out with

undefined method 'user' for

If I stick in a string like ‘[e-mail]’ the proper number of emails go out, so that part seems to work. Now it is a matter of passing the right email addresses to the message.

Relevant code from my document_observer below:

 def after_save(model)
   @users = User.all
   @users.each do |user|
     if model.access.include? user.team
       MultiMailer.doc_notification(model).deliver
     end
   end  
 end

Relevant code from mailer. How do I pass on user.email for each email?

def doc_notification(document)
  mail(:to => '[e-mail]')
end

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Latest Update:

Ok, I just switched a couple of lines to

MultiMailer.doc_notification(user).deliver

and

def doc_notification(user)

So now the email goes out to each of the right users, but it appears I am just reversing the problem above and trading unknown user for unknown document. The email needs to reference the URL for the document that was just updated..

I should also mention that there is no association between Document and User.

Answer 1

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The Answer

From the document_observer

def after_save(model)
  @users = User.all
  @users.each do |user|
    if model.access.include? user.team
      MultiMailer.doc_notification(model, user).deliver
    end
  end
end

From the mailer

def doc_notification(document, user)
  @document = document
  mail(:to => user.email)
end

Credit goes to a very nice Nathaniel Talbott of Triangle Ruby Brigade who answered my question in person. I guess it helps to get out the house sometimes.