Question

I’m trying to build a contact form using the approach I saw in the Railscast about ActiveAttr (which gives me a Message model that isn’t backed by a database).

This code is in the controller for Messages:

class MessagesController < ApplicationController
  def new
    @message = Message.new
  end

  def create
   @message = Message.new(params[:message])
   if @message.valid?
     # TODO send message here
     redirect_to root_url, notice: "Message sent! Thank you for contacting us."
   else
     render "new"
   end
  end
end

I don’t know what kind of code I need to write in order for the contact form input (the message) to be sent to a specific email address during the create action. Would someone please give me a general overview of what I need to know or need to set up in order to make this work? Thank you.

Answer 1

You can add something like this.

def create
  @message = Message.new(params[:message])
  if @message.valid?
    UserMailer.send_message(@message).deliver
    redirect_to whatever_path, notice: "Message sent."
  else
    render "new"
  end
end

You will need to create a Mailer. It’s pretty easy and Rails already has a great guide on how to do this. http://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_mailer_basics.html

Create a mailer

rails generate mailer UserMailer

Then in your UserMailer app\mailers\user_mailer.rb

def send_message(message)
  @message = message
  email = "[e-mail]"
  mail to: email, subject: "You have received a message"
end

Then create your email view app\views\user_mailer.txt.erb

You have a new message

Your message says

<%= @message.whatever_attribute %>