Question

I’m building a prelaunch signup site with this tutorial. http://railsapps.github.com/tutorial-rails-prelaunch-signup.html. After a user enters their email to request an invite, it uses ajax to render a _thankyou.html partial, which is rendered from the overridden Devise registrations controller.

However, the site also uses an after_create :send_welcome_email callback to send a welcome ‘thanks for requesting the invite’ email. This slows down the performance of the ajax significantly. Without the after_create call back, the ajax (at least on local host) works very fast, the form disappears quickly and the thank you partial is rendered almost instantly. However, if I include the after_create callback, the form takes a long time to disappear (which will cause users to click the submit button multiple times, creating more problems) and the thankyou partial also takes a long time…

Is there a way to arrange things so that the email gets triggered after the thank you partial is rendered?

The new devise create method

 # ovverride #create to respond to AJAX with a partial
  def create
    build_resource

    if resource.save
      if resource.active_for_authentication?
        sign_in(resource_name, resource)
        (render(:partial => 'thankyou', :layout => false) && return)  if request.xhr?
        respond_with resource, :location => after_sign_up_path_for(resource)
      else
        expire_session_data_after_sign_in!
        (render(:partial => 'thankyou', :layout => false) && return)  if request.xhr?
        respond_with resource, :location => after_inactive_sign_up_path_for(resource)
      end
    else
      clean_up_passwords resource
      render :action => :new, :layout => !request.xhr?
    end
  end

The ajax triggered on the request invite submit.

// use AJAX to submit the "request invitation" form
  $('#invitation_button').live('click', function() {
    var email = $('form #user_email').val();
    var password = $('form #user_password').val();
    var dataString = 'user[email]='+ email + '&user[password]=' + password;
    $.ajax({
      type: "POST",
      url: "/users",
      data: dataString,
      success: function(data) {
        $('#request-invite').html(data);
      }
    });
    return false;
  });

Answer 1

my guess is sending the email is what takes the most time, try using delayed_job or some other background processing to do the actual sending of the email, so the after_create would just queue the email to be sent, but it would actually be sent by a background process

https://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job