How to render the HTML of a Mailable?

Question

I have a Mailable which accepts two parameters which are used in the generated view when sent to the user. I want to emit an event once the Mailable has sent, however, a parameter should be passed to that event which is the string version of the view that is generated by the Mailable with the variables replaced:

namespace App\Mail;

use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Mail\Mailable;
use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;
use App\Events\CommunicationEvent;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;

class DummyMail extends Mailable
{
    use Queueable, SerializesModels;

    /**
    * Create a new message instance.
    *
    * @return void
    */
    public function __construct($title, $name)
    {
        $this->title = $title;
        $this->name = $name;
    }

    /**
    * Build the message.
    *
    * @return $this
    */
    public function build()
    {
        $this->from('dummy@test.com')->subject('Howdy!')->view('mail.dummy-tpl')->with([
            'title' => $this->title,
            'name' => $this->name
        ]);
    }
}

I have tried:

• Adding event(new CommunicationEvent($this->render())); before and after the $this->from([...])[...] call in the build function
• I have tried calling (new DummyMail($this->title, $this->name))->render(); as suggested here. The event is not fired nor is the response of my AJAX request successful, both storage/logs/laravel.log and apache2 logs are not helpful.
• I have tried calling $this->buildMarkdownView() that should have a key called html which should give me the template, however that throws an error saying 'View [] not found.'.

So, how can I simply return the view that is generated for the email as a string so that it can be passed to the event that I plan on emitting?

Answer 1

So, I've managed to render the template and pass it to the event, it might not be the most "eloquent" solution however, it seems to do the job.

1. In your Mailable define publicly the view that will be used:

   public $view = 'mail.dummy-tpl';
   

2. In the build function, after $this->from('dummy@test.com')[...] we need to get the rendered template as a string:

   $tpl = view($this->view, [
       'title' => $this->title,
       'name' => $this->name,             
   ])->render();
   

   I've noticed that you don't need to use the render function to return the rendered template as string however everywhere I looked it was advised to use render, so better to be explicit.

3. Finally, call the event of your choice using the event helper:

   event(new CommunicationEvent($tpl, $this));
   

With the above changes made, the resultant Mailable class should now be:

<?php

namespace App\Mail;

use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Mail\Mailable;
use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;
use App\Events\CommunicationEvent;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;

class DummyMail extends Mailable
{
    use Queueable, SerializesModels;

    public $view = 'mail.dummy-tpl';

    /**
    * Create a new message instance.
    *
    * @return void
    */
    public function __construct($title, $name)
    {
        $this->title = $title;
        $this->name = $name;
    }

    /**
    * Build the message.
    *
    * @return $this
    */
    public function build()
    {
        $this->from('dummy@test.com')->subject('Howdy!')->with([
            'title' => $this->title,
            'name' => $this->name
        ]);

        $tpl = view($this->view, [
            'title' => $this->title,
            'name' => $this->name,             
        ])->render();

        event(new CommunicationEvent($tpl, $this));        
    }
}

Note: As we have defined the property $view publicly, we no longer need the view chain in the following code:

$this->from('dummy@test.com')->subject('Howdy!')->view('mail.dummy-tpl')->with([
    'title' => $this->title,
    'name' => $this->name
]);`  

Gotchas

Ensure that the $view property is public otherwise you'll get the following error:

Access level to App\Mail\DummyMail::$view must be public (as in class Illuminate\Mail\Mailable)