Ruby On Rails 面试题与答案

Question: How can you send a MULTI-PART Email?

Nowadays most email clients support HTML email, however there are still some old Blackberry phones that prefer emails the ‘ol text way. 

Therefore it is important to send emails both as HTML and text. This technique is called multi-part emails. 

The ActionMailer class (included in Rails 3.0) does a great job of sending both text and HTML emails out to the end user at the same time. 

By default Rails sending an email with plain/text content_type, for example:

# app/models/notifier.rb
def send_email(email)
  subject       email.subject
  from          email.from
  recipients    email.recipients
  sent_on       Time.now
  body          :email => email
end

Next let’s update the view in : app/views/notifier/send_email.html.erb

Welcome to here: 

The sent email is a plain text email

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2010 16:38:07 +0800
From: RailsBP 
To: flyerhzm@gmail.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Welcome: http://rails-bestpractices.com

The link url is just displayed as a plain text because of the email content_type.

TEXT/HTML

If we want the email clients to display link url as html format, we should change the content_type to text/html in the app/models/notifier.rb file

def send_email(email)
  subject          email.subject
  from             email.from
  recipients       email.recipients
  sent_on          Time.now
  content_type     "text/html"
  body             :email => email
end

Now the sent email is a html formatted email

Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2010 17:32:27 +0800
From: RailsBP 
To: flyerhzm@gmail.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Welcome: http://rails-bestpractices.com

Now the email client can display the link url correctly with html format.

The email header looks somewhat like this:

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_002C_01BFABBF.4A7D6BA0"
Content-Type: multipart/alternative tells the e-mail program to expect different parts to follow, separated by a boundary which specified in quotation marks. Actually the boundary could be anything, though hyphens, equal signs, and underscores insure that the e-mail program won't try to display this boundary to the recipient.
------=_NextPart_000_002C_01BFABBF.4A7D6BA0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit