Question

Problem

I have an app where one can make pledges against a gift. Once a pledge is made, an email confirmation should be sent to pledger. Server is issuing 500 Internal Server Error when attempting to mail.

Context:

• Ruby on Rails 3.2.0
• Actionmailer 3.2.0
• Mongoid 2.4.3
• Thin 1.3.1

I’ve used Actionmailer on previous apps, but this is my first time working with Mongoid.

Code

class Pledge
  include Mongoid::Document
  field :name, :type => String
  field :email, :type => String
  field :amount, :type => Float

  embedded_in :gift
end 


class PledgesController < ApplicationController
  def create
    @gift = Gift.find(params[:gift_id])
    @pledge = @gift.pledges.new(params[:pledge])

    respond_to do |format|
      if @pledge.save
        PledgeMailer.pledge_confirmation(@pledge).deliver
        format.html { redirect_to :root, notice: 'Pledge successfully created.' }
      else
        ...
      end
    end
  end
...
end


class PledgeMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  default :from => "[e-mail]"

  def pledge_confirmation(pledge)
    @pledge = pledge
    mail(:to => pledge.email, :subject => "Thanks - pledge confirmation")
  end
end

Log

So let’s say Sam Andreas at [e-mail] pledged $42.42 for gift 4f2695009f5b7f3464000001.

This happily saves to Mongodb and redirects to :root. With adding the call to PledgeMailer, we get:

Started POST "/gifts/4f2695009f5b7f3464000001/pledges" for 127.0.0.1 at 2012-02-08 14:13:21 +1100
Processing by PledgesController#create as HTML
  Parameters: {"utf8"=>"✓", "authenticity_token"=>"EwgOwALSb8uUsT4Ow1+RBvAEihXKXoqKS1JA9ZfpUfg=", 
    "pledge"=>{"name"=>"Sam Andreas", "email"=>"[e-mail]", "amount"=>"42.42"}, 
    "commit"=>"Create Pledge", "gift_id"=>"4f2695009f5b7f3464000001"}
  MONGODB danspressie_development['gifts'].find({:_id=>BSON::ObjectId('4f2695009f5b7f3464000001')}).limit(-1).sort([[:_id, :asc]])
  MONGODB danspressie_development['gifts'].update({"_id"=>BSON::ObjectId('4f2695009f5b7f3464000001')}, {"$push"=>{"pledges"=>{"_id"=>BSON::ObjectId('4f31e8519f5b7f41d1000002'), "name"=>"Sam Andreas", "email"=>"[e-mail]", "amount"=>42.42}}})
  Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 11ms

SyntaxError (/Users/daniel/Dropbox/dev/src/danspressie/app/mailers/pledge_mailer.rb:4: invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)
/Users/daniel/Dropbox/dev/src/danspressie/app/mailers/pledge_mailer.rb:4: syntax error, unexpected $end, expecting keyword_end 
  def pledge_confirmation(pledge)
 ^):
  app/controllers/pledges_controller.rb:8:in `block in create'
  app/controllers/pledges_controller.rb:6:in `create'

Struggling hard, but can’t see where the error is in pledge_confirmation.

Do you have any pointers? 🙂

Answer 1

Your code looks fine. The error is complaining about an “invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)”. You’d better recreate pledge_mailer.rb from scratch and save it with charset UTF-8 instead of US-ASCII.