How to disable ActionMailer in rails_admin?

Question

I use ActionMailer to send different notifications to user. I use Model callbacks for this. When I do changes as admin, I don't want any email to be sent to client.

How can I disable ActionMailer in RailsAdmin?

Actually, I'd like to provide an ability to admin to turn on/off emails.

Thanks

Answer 1

Triggering your mailers in the model lifecycle is not recommended IMHO. The recommended approach would be to trigger the mailers from the controller.

If you want to achieve separation of concerns in your controller and not pollute your controller code with mailer calls, you can use a combination of ActiveSupport::Notifications and controller after_filter to extract the mailer logic into its own module.

module MailerCallbacks
  module ControllerExtensions
    def self.included(base)
      base.after_filter do |controller|
        ActiveSupport::Notifications.instrument(
          "mailer_callbacks.#{controller_path}##{action_name}", controller: controller
        )
      end
    end
  end

  module Listener
    def listen_to(action, &block)
      ActiveSupport::Notifications.subscribe("mailer_callbacks.#{action}") do |*args|
        event = ActiveSupport::Notifications::Event.new(*args)
        controller = event.payload[:controller]
        controller.instance_eval(&block)
      end
    end
  end
end

Let's assume you want to refactor the following controller using our module created above:

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  def create
    @post = Post.new permitted_params

    respond_to do |format|
      if @post.save
        PostMailer.notify(@post).deliver
        format.html { redirect_to @post, notice: 'Successfully created Post' }
      else
        format.html { render action: 'new' }
      end
    end
  end
end

Take the following steps:

1. Create an initializer to register the controller extension:

   # config/initializers/mailer_callbacks.rb
   ActiveSupport.on_load(:action_controller) do
     include MailerCallbacks::ControllerExtensions
   end
   

2. In the same or a separate initializer, create a class and extend the Listener module to register your callbacks:

   # config/initializers/mailer_callbacks.rb
   class MailerListeners
     extend MailerCallbacks::Listener
   
     # register as many listeners as you would like here
   
     listen_to 'posts#create' do
       PostMailer.notify(@post).deliver if @post.persisted?
     end
   end
   

3. Remove mailer code from your controller.

   class PostsController < ApplicationController
     def create
       @post = Post.new permitted_params
   
       respond_to do |format|
         if @post.save
           format.html { redirect_to @post, notice: 'Successfully created Post' }
         else
           format.html { render action: 'new' }
         end
       end
     end
   end
   

Essentially we have created an observer on the controller actions and registered our mailer callbacks with the controller instead of tying it into the model lifecycle. I personally consider this approach cleaner and easier to manage.

Answer 2

Let's separate this question into 2 parts:

1. Disable email

   Check this answer

2. Integration with Rails Admin

   You can add it to Rails Admin Navigation part and put it into separate controller for admin mailer turn on/off. More info here.

Answer 3

You should handle it on callback method.

def call_back_name
  if is_rails_admin?
   #Do nothing
  else 
    #send mail
  end
end