rails mailer with different layouts - ruby-on-rails

Question

I use one layout for all my emails in my Notifier model (20+ emails)... however sometimes I just want to send a plain text email with no layout or html at all. I can't seem to be able to figure out how? If I try to send a plain text email i still get the layout, and all the HTML in the email.
I'm using Rails 2.3.8.
I read about this monkey patch here... but it seemed to indicate a newer version of rails had over come this? And I don't really wanna monkey patch if I can avoid one.
Rails - setting multiple layouts for a multipart email with mailer templates
layout "email" # use email.text.(html|plain).erb as the layout
def welcome_email(property)
subject 'New Signup'
recipients property.email
from 'welcome#test.com'
body :property => property
content_type "text/html"
end
def send_inquiry(inquire)
subject "#{inquire.the_subject}"
recipients inquire.ob.email
from "Test on behalf of #{inquire.name} <#{inquire.email}>"
body :inquire => inquire
content_type "text/plain"
end
I also have 2 files.
email.text.html.erb
email.text.plain.erb
It always uses text.html.erb... even if the content_type is "text/plain"

Answer 1

edit: Figured it out, the layouts follow a different naming scheme to the email templates. Just rename them as follows:
layout.text.html.erb => layout.html.erb
layout.text.plain.erb => layout.text.erb
I also made the mistake of manually defining the parts, if you use this:
part :content_type => 'text/plain',
:body => render_message('my_template')
Then Rails can't determine the content_type for your part and it assumes it's HTML.
After I changed those two things it worked for me!
original reply follows..
I've struggled with this question many times in the past, usually ending up with some sort of non-dry quick and dirty solution. I always thought I was the only one with this problem because Google turns up exactly nothing useful on the subject.
This time I decided to dig into Rails to figure it out but so far without much success, but maybe my findings will help someone else figure this out.
What I found was that in ActionMailer::Base the #render_message method is tasked with determining the proper content_type and should assign it to #current_template_content_type. #default_template_format then either returns the proper mime type for the layout or, if #current_template_content_type isn't set, it will default to :html.
This is what ActionMailer::Base#render_message looks like in my app (2.3.5)
def render_message(method_name, body)
if method_name.respond_to?(:content_type)
#current_template_content_type = method_name.content_type
end
render :file => method_name, :body => body
ensure
#current_template_content_type = nil
end
The trouble is that method_name appears to be a string (the name of the local view, in my case "new_password.text.html") and strings of course do not respond_to #content_type, meaning #current_template_content_type will always remain nil, and so the #default_template_format will always default to :html.
Not much closer to an actual solution, I know. The ActionMailer internals are just too opaque for me.

Answer 2

OK, not sure if this works, but it seems the default content_type is text/plain, so you would only need to set the content type if you want something other than text/plain.
Try this:
def send_inquiry(inquire)
subject "#{inquire.the_subject}"
recipients inquire.ob.email
from "Test on behalf of #{inquire.name} <#{inquire.email}>"
body :inquire => inquire
end
I still think you should consider this:
layout "email", :except => [:send_inquiry]
I would use the above because the plain text email does not seem to have a 'layout', only the actual content you want to send.

Answer 3

I found this that I think could be useful.
http://blog.blazingcloud.net/2009/11/17/simple-email-form-with-actionmailer/
He makes use of renaming the view templates for different content types.