My app has several events based on which a user gets an email notification. What's the best way to handle this from a software/database design perspective?
Here are two instances when I send out an email to a user:
Someone replies to their comment.
Someone likes their comment.
I also need a way for the user to turn these email events off individually in their user settings.
Here is what I'm thinking of doing (which doesn't feel like a good way):
Have a bunch of boolean fields in the user table that turn on or off each email notification (eg: is_send_email_replies, is_send_comment_likes).
The user can then turn these bool values on or off in their setting.
Is there a better more pragmatic way to handle this?
This is considered a typical user settings where you can save it as a Rails json field or use gems like rails-settings
So assuming you'll use rails-settings gem you can do it as follows:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_settings :email_notifications
end
then you can set and get settings like this
user.settings(:email_notifications).comments = true
user.settings(:email_notifications).likes = false
user.settings(:email_notifications).comments
# => true
I suggest you watch Ryan Bates' Railscasts on activity (ep. #406) and then reading into the public-activity gem. That can be an elegant way to handle the events that send out notifications to users.
As for how you will store and deal with preferences, check out the Preferences gem As the description itself says: ...sometimes it's necessary if you want users to be able to disable things like e-mail notifications.
One way that I've handled this in the past is to have a separate model for the preferences and for the email type. The preferences table acts as sort of a many to many relationship between users and types where they can set there own preference.
The main advantage here is you can add as many email types as you want (over time) and you wont be clogging up your user model.
Related
I am making an event registration tool in Rails and I am having trouble working out the mailing section. I am using Mailgun API and I've got a generic "Thank you for Registering" email working when the user signs up as well as a contact form submission that comes to my email. Part of the requirements for the application is the ability to send promotional emails (separate from Thank you for Registering emails). These promotional emails are more like (One week reminder) type emails.
So these emails need to be able to be created by the admin setting up the event as this is a general purpose tool. So to save the emails the admin creates, I have a mailings object. So the relationship is a bit like this:
Event has many mailers, registrations, etc. (and those belong to the event). They are nested resources because they are specific to an event. Now I need to bridge the gap of how to go from the mailers created by the admin to sending them to Mailgun. The problem is we will have to have the ability to add recipients because they may want to send to people besides the registrants for the event. So I need to go from the mailing#show (which shows a preview of the mailing and will need to be able to add/remove recipients), loop through all of the recipients, and send the message that is in the mailing.message field.
I am so close to finishing this tool except for this mailing which I cannot wrap my head around. I see a lot of examples that create a mailer but I am not sure if that would work for me since the message are unique and it needs to get the message and subject from the mailer object. Any advice or guidance? I am really struggling to get this part done.
I assume you have a User model with an email column
I would setup an extra model i.e.
class PromoMail < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :users # recpients
validates :body, presence: true
end
Then add a controller, where admins can create these and insert the Mail content in the body field and add recipients.
Then create a new method in your existing mailer to send the mail with the yielded body to one user.
Then add a action to the forementioned controller to send the PromoMail by looping over the associated users and call the ne mailer metod with each.
Couple of steps here, without going into much detail.
1) Make a rake task which looks for any emails which needs to be sent out, and sends them out. You might need to expand your schema to record whether a mail (or mailing or whatever) has been sent already. The rake task itself shouldn't have much code, it should just call a class method in eg User or Mailing or something.
You'll need to think about how the system can decide which emails need to get sent out. I find that flowcharts can be helpful here: it's going to involve iterating over all users, or all mailings, or something, and applying various logical tests to them. You may find that your current schema isn't up to the job, in which case expand it.
2) Schedule this rake task to be run at regular intervals, eg once a day or once a week. Various scheduled task runners are available, eg cron, or if you're on Heroku you'll need to use their Scheduler tool, for example.
I am using rails+devise. I want the user to be able to confirm multiple e-mails (the app would send for each address a mail with a "confirm" link, and then the user have one or many confirmed mails). It is possible to confirm one with :confirmable (doc :
http://rubydoc.info/github/plataformatec/devise/master/Devise/Models/Confirmable )
I thought that i could play with
- (Object) resend_confirmation_instructions
by changing the address but this is not the best solution.
Is there a solution with devise or do i have to implement this specific functionnality?
You'll have to implement this yourself. Devise has one email per account, by default.
You'd not only need to handle multiple emails, but presumably you'd also want multiple confirmation_token's, along with multiples of the other database fields relating to email confirmation (find them in the devise migration file that gets generated). I don't imagine this will be a simple thing to solve with devise.
However, this sounds like a counter intuitive thing to do. Perhaps you should update your question to include the requirements of your app, and the reason why you need to get confirmation from multiple email addresses. Someone may have a solution for how to architect your app such that it doesn't need this feature.
I have Users that can create DinnerEvent that contain Food. User specify preferred Food using a join table. Would like to create an internal message system that automatically sends out a notice to other Users who "prefer" the Food in the DinnerEvent that was created. Can anyone provide some guidance as to how I can go about approaching this or if there are any good reference resources out there (haven't had much luck searching)? Thought about ActiveMailer but decided I wouldn't want people to get spammed all the time in their email inbox. Would prefer to only use Rails to achieve this.
There's a lot of options here and many use cases to think through. Maybe you can start with something very simple that:
Tracks the last date/time of login for each user
On some page (specific to the logged in user), display all DinnerEvents created since last login that match their Food preferences. Should be simple Active Record to pull this.
Continue to show this list until they dismiss it (record this date/time) or login again
A full blown messaging system will probably require more complex stuff like queues for each user that are subscribed to a master queue. And, possibly an additional backend data store like Redis. I'm purposefully leaving out the details of something like this for now; it's a much bigger topic.
Devise allows you to customize mailers here.
https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wiki/How-To:-Use-custom-mailer.
However, I can also make a my own actionmailer like here.
http://railscasts.com/episodes/206-action-mailer-in-rails-3
When a user registers on my site, I would like to send two different emails, one to myself with the registration information and one to the user to thank them for registering.
What is the best way to do this? or is there a method that devise has that would allow me to do this? I was thinking of creating a hook(call back) in the model after a user is created. However, that would mean if I manually create a record, the registration emails would also be sent out. I don't want an email to be sent out if I manually create a user. Any advice?
You could have a callback such as after_create :send_email_to_admin
def send_email_to_admin
# your implementation
end
You would also put a conditional so it doesn't send an email when it's yourself creating the record manually. I do not think Devise offers such an option.
3 workarounds if you don't want to send email to your manually created users.
Create users at first, then add the hook.
Add a special pattern on the email of your manually created users. Say (.*)-very-weird-suffix#weired-email.com. You judge this pattern in the hook.
Add a field in users table to check if the account is created by you. I really don't recommend this unless creating accounts is part of your daily job.
I'm getting ready to add notification settings to my app. Allowing a user to select true/false, for which type of activities they want notifications for.
My idea for a model is: UserSettingsNotifications. I picked UserSettings, as it's tied to the User, and the user will have several setting types including notifications and others.
Something like:
rails generate model UserSettingNotifications CommentReply:boolean .....
What do you think? Good to go, or not- rails friendly?
You phrased it "notification settings". I suggest dropping the user prefix and naming it NotificationSettings since it's likely clear in the model it belongs_to :user