Question

i was wondering how do you make a helper file’s functions available to an action mailer? i have an action mailer called UserMailer and a helper called sessions_helper.rb. how do i make the methods available to UserMailer? ive tried ‘include’ but it gives the following error

the method im trying to get is “current_user” and i receive the error

undefined local variable or method `cookies' 

im using rails 3.2.1

thanks

Answer 1

You can helpers in your mailers like this,

class Notifier < ActionMailer::Base

  add_template_helper(ApplicationHelper)

  #...

end

As far as current_user go, I don’t think mailers have any concept of cookies as ActionController does. As a better design choice I’d keep my mailer independent of the current_user. Mailers are not concerned with who the current_user is ( similar to models ).
For that matters, mailers are not even concerned with who the user is, they are concerned with “email, subject, and body”.

So when calling mailer methods, you can pass them the user object ( it can be of the current_user or any body else ) so that they can get the email , generate the subject and the body.