Add a contact form to Hartl's tutorial - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm learning Rails by following Hartl's tutorial and making my own adjustments to it. Now, I would like to extent it and add a contact form that sends an email message. Such is not included in the tutorial, but by the end of chapter 10 we're learned to use the mailer method and we've configured SendGrid on Heroku.
I already have the view set up in the routes and think it would require the following additional steps:
1) Terminal. rails generate mailer ContactForm
2) In app/mailers/contactform.rb:
def send_contactform_email(visitor)
#visitor = visitor
mail( :to => myemail#example.com, :from => visitor.email, :subject => 'Contact form' )
end
3) app/views/contactform_mailer/ (the view for the mail message) for example:
<h1>Website contact form</h1>
<p>On <$= ... %> <%= "#{#visitor.name} (#{#visitor.email} sent the following message:" %></p>
<p><%= #visitor.message %></p>
4) app\controllers\static_pages_controller (or another location?)
# Sends contact form email.
def send_contact_form_email
ContactFormMailer.send_contactform_email(visitor).deliver_now
redirect_to contact_path, notice: 'Message sent'
end
5) app\views\static_pages\contact.html.erb (I'm not sure about the first line, should I also do something in the routes.rb? My guess is this first line will have to tell to execute the method in step 4, which is not going to work the way it is now.)
<%= form_for(:static_pages, url: contactform_path) do |f| %>
<i class="pt-row-icon glyphicon glyphicon-user"></i> <%= f.label :name %>
<%= f.text_field :name, placeholder: 'Name', class: 'form-control' %>
<i class="pt-row-icon glyphicon glyphicon-envelope"></i> <%= f.label :email %>
<%= f.email_field :email, placeholder: 'Email', class: 'form-control' %>
<i class="pt-row-icon glyphicon glyphicon-envelope"></i> <%= f.label :message %>
<%= f.text_area :message, placeholder: 'Your message…', class: 'form-control' %>
<%= f.submit "Send", class: "btn btn-primary" %>
<% end %>
I don't think this is 100% correct yet, particularly the bold sections. What are your thoughts?
UPDATE, VERSION 2: I've tried to make the updates as suggested by Ven and now have the code below. The idea as I understand it is that
the controller in def contact sets the #message variable.
the form_for knows it should fill this variable with params[:message].
the controller adopts the values from the form_for and passes them to the mailer.
the mailer uses the mailer view to design the message to be sent.
the mailer sends it back to the controller that send the message.
1) App/controllers/static_pages_controller.rb
class StaticPagesController < ApplicationController
before_action :valid_email?, only: [:send_message_email]
# Shows the contact form page
def contact
#message = message(message_params)
end
# Sends the message.
def send_message_email
#message = message(message_params)
if #message.valid?
MessageMailer.new_message(#message).deliver_now
redirect_to contact_path, notice: "Your messages has been sent."
else
flash[:alert] = "An error occurred while delivering this message."
render :new
end
end
private
def message_params
params.require(:message).require(:name, :email, :content)
end
def valid_email?(email)
VALID_EMAIL_REGEX = /\A[\w+\-.]+#[a-z\d\-]+(\.[a-z\d\-]+)*\.[a-z]+\z/i
email.present? && (email =~ VALID_EMAIL_REGEX)
end
end
2) Contact form in app\views\static_pages\contact.html.erb:
<%= form_for(message: params[:message], url: contact_path) do |f| %>
<%= f.label :name %> <%= f.text_field :name, placeholder: 'Name', class: 'form-control' %>
<%= f.label :email %> <%= f.email_field :email, placeholder: 'Email', class: 'form-control' %>
<%= f.label :content %> <%= f.text_area :content, placeholder: 'Your message…', class: 'form-control' %>
<%= f.submit "Send", class: "btn btn-primary" %>
<% end %>
3) Routes.rb
get 'contact' => 'static_pages#contact', as: 'contact'
post 'contact' => 'static_pages#send_message_email'
4) App/views/message_mailer.text.erb (and html.erb)
<%= #message[:name] %> <%= #message[:email] %> wrote:
<%= #message[:content] %>
5) App/mailers/message_mailer.rb
class MessageMailer < ApplicationMailer
default to: "myemail#example.com>"
def new_message(message)
#message = message
mail to: "myemail#example.com"
mail from: #message[:email]
mail subject: "Message from #{message[:name]}"
end
end
Now when I try to visit the contact form on the server, I get the error message: param is missing or the value is empty: message. It refers to the params.require(:message).require(:name, :email, :content) line. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. Changing it to params.require(:message).permit(:name, :email, :content) makes no difference.

Answer 1

4) app\controllers\static_pages_controller (or another location?)
This seems to be correct, if this is the github repo for said app.
def send_contact_form_email
You controller has an issue: this action will try to send the email, not matter if it's used in POST or GET. You should use two different actions, one for displaying the view (using GET), and one for sending the email (using the mailer class you created). (at this point, you might want to create another controller)
ContactFormMailer.send_contactform_email(visitor).deliver_now
Then, moving on: what you pass to your mailer is "visitor". There's no such variable.
You probably want to access something out of the params hash (which contains parameters for GET and POST requests), and use the same key as your form (form_for(:visitor ... => params[:visitor] (so you want to change that :static_pages)).
<p>On <$= ... %> <%= "#{#visitor.name} (#{#visitor.email} sent the following message:" %></p>
As this returns an object, and not a hash, #visitor.email needs to be #visitor[:email] inside the mailer.
One last thing: simply using params[:visitor] will mean people could leave the field blanks. You might want to look into strong parameters, that were added in Rails 4 (the book seems somewhat outdated?).
And lastly, you need to add routes to be able to reach these actions (one for the GET request - display the view - and one for the POST request - to submit the form).
PS:
mail( :to => myemail#example.com, :from => visitor.email, :subject => 'Contact form' )
Warning: here, you forgot to quote the email address. Also, you swapped the to/from parameters. You want to send TO your visitor email, not from it.
EDIT
params.require(:message).require(:name, :email, :content)
This will require said keys, but AFAIK on the same "level" as :message - the top one. You want to use permit:
params.require(:message) # require "namespace"
.permit(:name, :email, :content) # permit keys
#message = message(message_params)
Where is the message function defined?
mail to: "myemail#example.com"
mail from: #message[:email]
mail subject: "Message from #{message[:name]}"
This sends 3 different emails, since you called the mail function 3 times.