MailView -- Visual email testing

Preview plain text and html mail templates in your browser without redelivering it every time you make a change.

This fork

If you have several mailer classes you needed to write those classes inside the routes.rb, but with this fork you don't need to write them the library do it for you (We save the classes that are descendant of MailView)

Installation

Install as a plugin:

Rails 3

rails plugin install git://github.com/aspgems/mail_view.git

Rails 2

script/plugin install git://github.com/aspgems/mail_view.git

add the following line to Gemfile:

gem 'tilt'

and run bundle install from your shell.

Usage

Since most emails do something interesting with database data, you'll need to write some scenarios to load messages with fake data. Its similar to writing mailer unit tests but you see a visual representation of the output instead.

    class Notifier < ActionMailer::Base
      def invitation(inviter, invitee)
        # ...
      end

      def welcome(user)
        # ...
      end

      class Preview < MailView
        # Pull data from existing fixtures
        def invitation
          account = Account.first
          inviter, invitee = account.users[0, 2]
          Notifier.invitation(inviter, invitee)
        end

        # Factory-like pattern
        def welcome
          user = User.create!
          mail = Notifier.welcome(user)
          user.destory
          mail
        end
      end
    end

Methods must return a Mail or TMail object. Using ActionMailer, call Notifier.create_action_name(args) to return a compatible TMail object. Now on ActionMailer 3.x, Notifier.action_name(args) will return a Mail object.

Routing

A mini router middleware is bundled for Rails 2.x support.

    # config/environments/development.rb
    config.middleware.use MailView::Mapper

For Rails³ you can map the app inline in your routes config.

    # config/routes.rb
    mount MailView => 'mail_view' if Rails.env.development?

Now just load up http://localhost:3000/mail_view.

Interface