And how can I then generate the pdf document? Like the railscast, I just had to create a .pdf.prawn document and that's it.

You do not need the real PDF file as attachment. Actually, only the generated content (binary stream) of this pdf document is necessary. You can access to this stream via response object. Your codes of controller should looks like the following:

def show # just a example
  render # force to generate pdf using prawnto so we can access to the response object
  pdf = response.body
  YourMailer.deliver_generated_pdf(current_user, pdf)
end

Hi Wouter,

How about this?

In your controller, you generate the PDF file:

Prawn::Document.new do      
    text "THIS IS A PDF"
end.render

Notifier.deliver_signup_notification(customer_email, pdf_file)

In your notifier action mailer:

def signup_notification(customer_email, pdf_file)
    @from         = "example@email.com"
    @recipients   = customer_email
    @subject      = "Reactie"
    @sent_on      = Time.now
    @content_type = "text/html"

    attachment :content_type => "application/octet-stream", :filename => "your_file_name_here.pdf", :body => pdf_file    
end

Hope that helps. Something wrong with format here, so I paste the code in "here":http://pastie.org/554806

Sonny

Wouter,

Have you ever managed to get this working? I'm attempting to do the same thing. Basically what I want to do is have my model access the prawn pdf so I can easily attach the file when I send the email out. I found that you do it from the controller using: @output = render_to_string :template => 'invoices/show.pdf.prawn', :layout => false

But apparently you can't use render_to_string in the model or in a rake task. For a model and rake task I found these articles http://www.compulsivoco.com/2008/10/rendering-rails-partials-in-a-model-or-background-task/ http://www.gregorydoran.co.uk/2009/08/ruby-on-rails-rendering-views-outside-of-the-controller/ http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/14f5f3f6f7819d27

following those I figured in my Invoice Model I could do something like this

def pdf_file

av = ActionView::Base.new(Rails::Configuration.new.view_path)
av.extend ApplicationController.master_helper_module 
output = av.render(
  :file => 'invoices/show.pdf.prawn',
  :locals => {:invoice => self},
  :layout => false 
)

end

My ideas was in my mailer I could attach the file using something like this.

def test(user, invoice)

recipients    user.email
from          "Testing "
subject       "Email Testing"
body          :user => user
content_type "text/html"
attachment "application/pdf" do |a|
  a.body = invoice.pdf_file
end

end

But in the end I'm stuck with a weird prawn error

ActionView::TemplateError: ActionView::TemplateError (You have a nil object when you didn't expect it! The error occurred while evaluating nil.compute_prawnto_options) on line #1 of app/views/invoices/show.pdf.prawn: 1: pdf.text "Invoice ##{@invoice.id}", :size => 30, :style => :bold 2: pdf.text "#{@invoice.user.firstname} #{@invoice.user.lastname}", :size => 20 3: pdf.text "#{@invoice.user.address1}", :size => 20 ......

I know I'm not offering any solution but maybe some of this might point you into the right direction. Let me know if you ever get it working.