Question

I’m using ActionMailer to send emails, but I’d like to use Sinatra’s Tilt rendering. I don’t know how to access Sinatra’s instance scope from outside Sinatra so I can do this:

class Mailer < ActionMailer
  def test(address)
    mail(:to=>address,
         :body => 'turns out you need something here?') do |format|
      details = erb(:myview)
      format.text { details }
      format.html { markdown(details) }
    end
  end
end

Hopefully you can see what I’m trying to do, but at the moment I’m getting a ‘method not found’ error. Any ideas how I can include Sinatra’s instance scope in the format block?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Here are several options.

Number One (kind of ugly)

class Mailer < ActionMailer
  def test(address, instance)
    mail(:to=>address,
         :body => 'turns out you need something here?') do |format|
      details = instance.erb(:myview)
      format.text { details }
      format.html { markdown(details) }
    end
  end
end

Then in your app

get '/send_mail' do
  Mailer.new.test('[e-mail]', self)
end

Number Two

Define your Mailer class within your app’s helpers block. This should give it access to erb. I did something very similar with the plain-old mail gem. Except I defined a method rather than a whole class. Think it should still work, though.

helpers do
  class Mailer < ActionMailer
    def test(address)
      mail(:to=>address,
           :body => 'turns out you need something here?') do |format|
        details = erb(:myview)
        format.text { details }
        format.html { markdown(details) }
      end
    end
  end
end

Number Three

Look at Sinatra and/or Tilt’s code, follow erb up the stack until it no longer cares about the request instance, and duplicate it.