Sending an email with SQL results in cakePHP - php

Question

I need to email all my users a daily product list in cakePHP 2.
I have the following code to get all the users emails.
$users = $this->User->find('all', array('fields' => array('email')));
foreach ($users as $user) {
$this->Email->reset();
$this->Email->from = '<no-reply#test.com.au>';
$this->Email->to = $user['email'];
$this->Email->subject = "Daily Products" ;
$this->Email->sendAs = 'html';
$this->Email->send();
}
Now I understand that I could use a html template for this and parse values to it but I really need a foreach loop inside the actual view itself and send the table of products.
What would be the best practise? cakePHP code in the controller or view to get the products?
Thanks

Answer 1

The best practice for this would be to use a shell to send the emails out. To avoid running out of memory you should read the users and their products in chunks and not all at the same time.
Inside the foreach loop you'll need to get the data for each user and set() it as any other variable it will be available in the html template then and you can render all the products there.
Here is some (shortened) code from a shell that processes data:
public function main() {
$this->loop();
}
public function loop() {
try {
while (true) {
if (!$this->poll()) {
$this->out(__('Nothing more to process, sleeping...'));
sleep($this->sleep);
}
}
} catch (Exception $e) {
$this->out($e->getMessage());
$this->log($e->getMessage(), 'processing');
}
}
public function poll() {
$this->out('Polling...');
$result = $this->Model->getFirstUnprocessed();
if ($result === false) {
return false;
}
// do something with the result here
return true;
}
This should be enough to give you an idea. For reading your users in chunks you would need to increment the offset in your find() options. In my case I just check if there is an unprocessed record and if yes i process and and wait a moment to do the next try.

Answer 2

The "view" for e-mails is actually an element. It's under Views/Elements/email. There are 2 folders there html and text, both meant to hold their respective templates.
You can do your foreach in there, then make sure to set the layout in your controller with:
$this->Email->sendAs = 'html'; // Can also be 'text' or 'both' (for multipart).
$this->Email->layout = 'foo'; // Would include Views/Elements/email/html/foo.ctp
Although the Email component is deprecated since CakePHP 2.0 and you should be using the CakeEmail component instead. See the book for more details on how to use that.