We’ve got a few emails that get sent out by our ASP.NET MVC 3 application.
In one of the emails, we want to add “Did you find this helpful?” to the footer of the email.
If they click “Yes”, some action needs to be taken in the database.
What approach should i take for these links?
I don’t really like the idea of doing a GET (e.g when they click the link), which then adds something to the database. GET’s should never update state. Is there a way i can make it do a POST instead?
I’m using ActionMailer to perform emails, if that matters.
EDIT:
To be clear, i’m how asking “how” to implement the MVC side of things. I know i can create an action which takes the id, etc and saves to the DB, but i’m asking about what is the correct approach from a REST-style point of view.
You can create a form and do a POST in an email but it wont work with certain mail clients. Here is a reference from 2007 that shows where it works and where it doesn’t:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2435/how-forms-perform-in-html-emai/
ETA: A POST would of course fit the REST pattern but probably not a good option in your case. Since you are presumably just incrementing a counter for helpfulness, having this URL exposed shouldn’t cause much of a problem.