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render_to_string in mailer causes subsequent render to fail

#6623

I'm using render_to_string in a mailer, and this prevents the rendering of the actual mail from finding the template.

This seems to be caused by @lookup_context being initialized on the mailer by render_to_string, then reused when rendering the mail. And this breaks because the mail extension (*.text.erb) is not found by the lookup context.

Here's a minimal example:

class NoteMailer < ActionMailer::Base
  default :from => "from@example.com"

  def foo
    @notes = []
    render_to_string(:template => "notes/index.html.erb") # <-- Removing this line makes the test pass
    # self.instance_variable_set(:@lookup_context, nil) # <-- So does enabling this
    mail(:to => "example@example.com")
  end
end

I'm attaching a minimal project containing a functional test that demonstrates this.

lookup_context_bug.zip 105 KB

Reported by Jacob Tjørnholm · March 25th, 2011 @ 02:31 PM

Activity

bhu
- Tag changed from actioncontroller, actionmailer to actioncontroller, actionmailer, rendering
think i got the same error
```
 def cancellation(contract, user)
    @contract = contract
    kit = PDFKit.new(render_to_string('pdf/cancellation', :layout => false))
    kit.stylesheets << 'private/stylesheets/cancellation.css'
    
    attachments['Cancellation.pdf'] = kit.to_pdf

    options = {}
    options[:to] = contract.email
    options[:from] = user.email
    options[:bcc] = user.email if Variable.send_employee_email_bcc
    options[:subject] = "Cancellation"

    mail options
  end
```
it renders nothing except the attachment which breaks the mail completely if there is no body.

the format block helps getting around this but i dont think that it's intended for this kind of situation
```
mail options do |format|
  format.text
  format.html
end
```
with this block the default behavior is some kind of restored. you have to explicitly specify every format. per real default rails is auto detecting which formats are available.

Sorry for not really having a solution, just a workaround :/
April 6th, 2011 @ 04:31 PM