rails 3: how to abort delivery method in actionmailer?

Question

In my mailer controller, under certain conditions (missing data) we abort sending the email.

How do I exit the controller method without still rendering a view in that case?

return if @some_email_data.nil?

Doesn't do the trick since the view is still rendered (throwing an error every place I try to use @some_email_data unless I add a lot of nil checks)

And even if I do the nil checks, it complains there's no 'sender' (because I supposed did a 'return' before getting to the line where I set the sender and subject.

Neither does render ... return

Basically, RETURN DOESN'T RETURN inside a mailer method!

Answer 1

A much simpler solution than the accepted answer would be something like:

class SomeMailer < ActionMailer::Base   def some_method     if @some_email_data.nil?       self.message.perform_deliveries = false     else       mail(...)       end     end end 

If you're using Rails 3.2.9 (or later things even better) - there you can finally conditionally call mail(). Here's the related GitHub thread. Now the code can be reworked like this:

class SomeMailer < ActionMailer::Base   def some_method     unless @some_email_data.nil?       mail(...)       end     end end 

Answer 2

I just encountered same thing here.

My solution was following:

module BulletproofMailer   class BlackholeMailMessage < Mail::Message     def self.deliver       false     end   end    class AbortDeliveryError < StandardError   end    class Base < ActionMailer::Base      def abort_delivery       raise AbortDeliveryError     end      def process(*args)       begin         super *args       rescue AbortDeliveryError         self.message = BulletproofMailer::BlackholeMailMessage       end     end   end end 

Using these wrapper mailer would look like this:

class EventMailer < BulletproofMailer::Base   include Resque::Mailer   def event_created(event_id)     begin       @event = CalendarEvent.find(event_id)     rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound       abort_delivery     end   end end 

It is also posted in my blog.