Question

I have a simple static website written in rails 3.

The site has one controller called pages and each static page is served as view. Such as pages/home, pages/about, pages/prices, etc. This all works great.

I’ve now run into a problem where I need to add a simple contactus feature but I’m struggling to get my head round the model/controller/views for this.

I already have a pages controller with a contactus view, that view has details addresses etc. Now I somehow need to get a message model into the contactus view so I can populate the model attirbutes and send the email.

Can I / Should I just create a new message model from within the Pages Controller as in ,

  class PagesController < ApplicationController

  def contact

   def new
    @message  = Message.new
   end

   def create
     @message = Message.new(params[:message])
     if @message.valid?
      # TO DO send message here using OS mail program.

      redirect_to root_url, notice: "Message sent! Thank you for contacting us."
     else
       render "new"
     end  
    end
  end

  def about

  end

  def products

  end

  def portfolio

  end

  def services

  end

end

Or should I take out the contactus view from the pages controller and make new controller called messages ?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I would have a separate controller called contact for example with new and create actions

def new
@message = Message.new
end

def create
@message = Message.new(params[:message])
if @message.valid?
  NotificationsMailer.new_message(@message).deliver
  redirect_to(root_path, :notice => "Message was successfully sent.")
else
  flash.now.alert = "Please fill all fields."
  render :new
end
end 

end

Then a separate model to handle your messages

 class Message 
 include ActiveModel::Validations
 include ActiveModel::Conversion
 extend ActiveModel::Naming

 attr_accessor :name, :email, :subject, :body, :file

 validates :name, :email, :subject, :body, :presence => true
 validates :email, :format => { :with => %r{.+@.+\..+} }, :allow_blank => true

 end

your attributes can be anything you like, obviously this is just an example of what you can do