Rails%203%20In%20Action

322 CHAPTER 12 Sending email
Great to see everything still passing! You’ve added email ticket notifications to your
application, so you should now make a commit saying just that and push it:
git add .
git commit -m "Add email ticket notifications"
git push
Now that you’ve got your application sending plain-text emails, let’s bring it into the
21st century by getting it to send out HTML emails as well.
12.1.6 Delivering HTML emails
Emails can have multiple parts associated with them, which allows emails to have
attachments and different content types. For instance, some email applications don’t
read HTML emails and will fall back to the text version of the template instead. More
modern applications will render the HTML, presenting a prettier, formatted email.
With HTML, you’re able to style your emails to include elements such as images,
and HTML tags such as the a tag. By doing this, you can provide a much better-looking
email than the plain-text version, as shown in figure 12.2.
You need to make only a couple of small changes to this email, such as the image at
the top and the link that now reads View This Ticket Online Here. You could do
more, but this will suit your purposes for now.
Some email clients don’t support receiving HTML-only emails. Thankfully, Action
Mailer has a solution to this problem. When you send your comment_updated email, it
will arrive all in the same message, but that message will contain multiple parts. The
first part of the email will be the text template that you set up earlier, and the second
part will be the new HTML version that you’ll code up in just a tad. Modern email clients
are smart enough to detect an email such as this, and if they’re capable of rendering
the HTML version they’ll do so; if not they will fall back to the plain-text
variant.
To test that this works, you add another couple of steps right after the check of the
email body in the scenario inside features/ticket_notifications.feature. These steps will
check that you receive an email that contains two parts, with one of them having the
content type of text/plain and the other of text/html:
Figure 12.2
A better-looking email