Devise invitable batch invite - Ruby on rails

Question

I'm trying to user Devise invitable to add multiple users at once. Basically when someone creates an account, the first thing they'll want to do is add a bunch of users using the invitable form...

just not sure how to duplicate fields in the form and have them send a create request for each entry.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

This is how I would do it.

Provide a text area that accepts a comma-separated email list. Define a new action that sends an invitation to each email in this list.

Lets assume a User model and a users controller for this example.

Define a route for the batch_invite action.

resources :users do
  collection do
    post 'batch_invite'
  end
end

Define the batch_invite action in the users_controller

def batch_invite
  #Validate the user_emails field isn't blank and emails are valid
  params[:user_emails].split(",").each do |email|
    User.invite!(:email => email)
  end
  #redirect_to appropriate path
end

A form that accepts a comma-separated list of emails in a textarea.

<%= form_tag batch_invite_users_path, :method => :post do %>
  <%= label_tag "Email ids of people you'd like to invite." %>
  <%= text_area_tag :user_emails %>
  <%= submit_tag "Invite!" %>
<% end %>

A couple of notes :

1. If you like your controller skinny, you could move the logic to the model, for instance, by creating a send_batch_invitations method in your User model and pass the params[:user_emails] as an argument to that method from the users controller.

2. Since the method that sends the invitations could take sufficient time to complete, I would suggest you assign this task to a background job processor, such as delayed_job or resque. There are railscasts that demonstrate the usage of these two background job processors.