By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your feedback is important to us!)

In rails development, when using ActionMailer a problem arises when attempting to programmatically send emails with links back to the rails application that generated them. This post describes how to link back to your hosted application cleanly and easily.

When building your view for generating text of your email, a common mistake is trying to simply use a standard link_to statement to provide a convenient link back to the hosting application.

[app/views/notifier/email_survey.text.erb]
<%= link_to 'Access Survey', responses_path %>

The code above will generate an HTML link within your email message but actual referenced (href) link will look something like the following:

The "applewebdata://0196E10E-4E7E-4664-B72B-A7491C12AF8E/responses" obviously is not a valid link, and if you click on this link within your email, it will go nowhere - chances are it won't even pull up your browser.

The fix for this is pretty simple and does not require any other environment configuration.

[app/views/notifier/email_survey.text.erb]
<%= link_to 'Access Survey', url_for(:controller => "responses", 
                                     :action => "index", :only_path => false) %>

The above simply links to a fixed location, such as an index page. If you want to link to a specific record (i.e. exercise an edit function) using the above method, your code needs to look something like this:

[app/views/notifier/email_survey.text.erb]
<%= link_to 'View Video Log Entry', url_for(:controller => "posts", :action => "edit", 
                                            :id => @entry, :only_path => false) %>

Exercising either of the recommended methods above, should generate a valid link as below:

The link above will correctly trigger your browser to launch and will access the link you specify in your code. Seems like a silly post to explain this, but why this isn't well documented is beyond me.

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