Best way to send registration email (DEVISE) - ruby-on-rails

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.

Related

General Guidance on Rails Mailers

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.

post only after confirming email

Guys in Rails how do I implement confirmation emails such that a nonuser can post only after confirming the email. So any regular person without an account views the site, submits post, verifies email and then the post is active. I already have devise installed but it seems its more for authenticating users. Whats the approach to take to implement the feature above and is there a specific gem to use?
i think you will need to think in a different way
in your posts list/show actions you can show posts for active users, so if users didn't confirm their account their posts won't be displayed and once they confirm their posts will be shown automatically.
I guess devise' confirmable module can be used for the same. Devise is not just for authenticating . Just like :database_authenticatable for authentication, :confirmable is to verify if an account is already confirmed.
More details on using confirmable can be seen here DeviseConfirmable
I cannot specify a gem (and that is off topic).
Typically you generate a unique and unguessable (long and random) token, store it along with the entity that it finalises, have a route in your app that can accept the token and set a flag in the associated entity (in your case the post). Then construct the confirmation link that invokes that route - including the token data that you just generated - to put in the email.
You might add two fields to the posts table (that you keep hidden from the web page):
email_confirm_token (indexed unique string)
email_confirmed (bool)
And only display posts that have email_confirmed set.
The Ruby standard lib SecureRandom class is a good source of token data.
If you want to verify more than one type of entity, you might want to factor this out. The concept is sometimes called a "nonce"

Confirm multiple emails with devise

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.

Devise, skip confirmation until user tries to do something meaningful

I want to let new users signup and browse my site without having to confirm their email addresses, until they try to do anything meaningful like create a new project, upload a video or leave a comment.
Does Devise have any hooks for doing this sort of thing?
Try to do it in combination of postponing email confirmation via allow_unconfirmed_access_for and confirmed? for specific actions, like described in similar question1 and question2.
BTW, starting from Devise 2.2.4 allow_unconfirmed_access_for accepts nil for unlimited access without confirmation.

Email confirmation in Rails without using any existing authentication gems/plugins

I'm working on this alerting service in Rails. And really, all I need to do is, when a user signs up, send a confirmation email to the user. And upon confirmation from the user, activate the user. I tried playing around with Matt Hooks' Authlogic email activation tutorial, but its really leading nowhere. So , any ideas how I can do this with minimum fuss ?
Thanks !
UPDATE
So how i got devise to do the job for me is :
Install the gem.
Create a migration for devise's confirmable fields.
Specify
devise :confirmable
in your model.
Create a confirm method in the relevant controller(and a route for that method) which would update the confirmed_at attribute of the relevant model.
The devise generator creates a few views for you, one which is confirmation_instructions.html.erb. Customize the path there.
I used Rails 2.3.2 and I 've used this method along with Authlogic's authentication and it worked well. I do plan to switch to devise completely.
In all honesty, I wanted to accept both answers (unfortunately I can't do that), but its just that the devise solution seemed a easier solution.
Assuming given the title that you definitely want to avoid Devise, Authlogic and friends, here's what I think you need to do:
Create 'confirmation code' and 'confirmed' attributes in your user model.
Create a new controller method on your user controller that expects a user id and confirmation code, looks up the user and then checks if the code in the parameter matches the code stored in the DB. If so, it clears the code and sets confirmed = true.
Create a route that maps e.g. /users/1/confirm/code to your new controller method.
Create an ActionMailer template for the e-mail you want to send. This should accept a user as a parameter, and use the confirmation code of the user to send a mail containing a link to your new route.
Create an observer for your user model. If the record is created or the e-mail address modified, then generate a random confirmation code, set it into the model and clear the confirmed flag. Then trigger your ActionMailer.
Create a helper method which allows views to check if the current user is confirmed.
Use this method to enable/disable functionality as appropriate. Remember to protect your controller methods as appropriate as well as your view logic.
You could also make use of scopes for selecting users.
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
scope :certified, where(:certified => true)
end
And then in your code:
#user = User.certified.find_by_username(foo)
Devise is an other excellent authentication gem that comes with email activation build in, perhaps you could give it a go.

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