[BUG]: Rendering rich text fields in plain text email includes HTML comments and tags

[Sukhpreet-s]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Current Behavior

In emails where rich text content is shown, it also shows the HTML tags and some random HTML comments (screenshot shown below). This behaviour is seen in development and likely is also happening in production. These emails includes:

• DistributionMailer.partner_mailer - Sent when a new distribution is created or an existing one is updated.
• ReminderDeadlineMailer.notify_deadline - Sent on set reminder_day for PartnerGroup or for Organization if reminder_day is not set for PartnerGroup. (In production, this email does not include the rich text content as of yet. But this PR will introduce this feature and it adds rich text content.)

Screenshot of the email:

Expected Behavior

The plain text versions of the emails should not show any HTML (comments or tags).

Steps To Reproduce

1. Sign in as an org/bank admin user -- for example org_admin1@example.com
2. In "My Organization" page, ensure that the field Default email text: has some text with some formatting applied. If it's empty, add some text with any formattings.
3. Pick a Partner for which we'll create a Distribution so that the email is sent -- for example, use partnerPawnee Parent Service -- edit the Partner Information by checking the Do you want this partner to receive emails for distributions and reminders from the system? setting.
4. Create any Distribution for the Partner selected in the last step.
5. An email should be sent to the Partner. In development environment, the email is saved under tmp/letter_opener -- Voilà, issue found! 🎉 -- the text.erb version will have the HTML comments and tags which shouldn't be there.

Environment

- OS:Ubuntu 24.04.1 (WSL virtualization)
- Node:
- npm:

Criteria for Completion

• DistributionMailer.partner_mailer -- the text.erb version of email should not show any HTML comments/tags.

Anything else?

Screenshot of the email:

Additional notes:

This bug is found while working on #5093 PR.

This is where the rich text is rendered:

human-essentials/app/views/distribution_mailer/partner_mailer.text.erb

Line 4 in ac675e8

<%= @default_email_text_interpolated %>

Code of Conduct

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[Sukhpreet-s]

Some findings that didn't work out to solve this:

RichText.to_plain_text() - Removes HTML tags while keeping the line breaks

Example screenshot of rendering rich text using `RichText.to_plain_text()`:

❗ Unfortunately, this cannot be used because the rich text in these emails can include variables that are interpolated with string manipulation using TextInterpolatorService. This service returns a string which is then available to render in the view.

Another option is to use ActionView::Helpers::SanitizeHelper.strip_tags. But... this removes the line breaks and spacing as shown below:

Example of rendering the same rich text as above but with `strip_tags`:

The ideal solution should remove the tags while maintaining the spacing -- which I'm still looking for. Any input on this is welcome 🙂

[dorner]

I think it's more likely that if we are adding rich text to an e-mail, there shouldn't be a plain text version at all. I'm not sure how many e-mail clients still work on plain text nowadays, to be honest.

[cielf]

Hmmm. I expect very few indeed. Though, honestly, I'm also not sure why we need Rich Text in these emails, really. Let's have a talk about all that in the planning meeting.

[cielf]

We came to a consensus that we can get rid of the plain text.