Question

I have created a contact form which will email me once sent. Now I need to be able to have the option of attaching a document that will be emailed to me also. i dont need to save it in a db as it will be with the email and downloaded from there.

Im new to rails so would like to see what other people have done in this situation, ive done some reading and see that i will need the gem paperclip in most instances? Also i have looked at jquery/paperclip in github but this seems a lot of work for what i hope is a small piece of work? I could be wrong here mind, so apologies if i am

Any help greatly appreciated

Answer 1

What you would have to do is use carrierwave gem or paperclip gem to upload the file to a specified folder in your public directory. I would do this using ajax that will allow you to upload the file instantly once you select the file to be sent. This would allow you to upload the attachment and have the file path known and ready so when you click submit, the following code will execute allowing you to send the file. You can also add a line of code to delete the file after it sent successfully if you don’t want to accumulate files on your server. More documentation can be found here..
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailer_basics.html#sending-emails-with-attachments

class ApplicationMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  def welcome(recipient)
    attachments['free_book.pdf'] = File.read('path/to/file.pdf')
    mail(:to => recipient, :subject => "New account information")
  end
end