UrlJob¶ ↑

Need to track if an email was opened? If a link was clicked? If a page was viewed? Too lazy to setup cron (or is it impossible?)?

Easy – Just create a url_job that when visited does things (like the above) for you.

This is a rails gem that provides an engine which allows for creating urls that execute jobs.

gem install url_job

rails g url_job
rake db:migrate

Now lets assume you have a class like:

class Redirector < Struct.new(:redirect_to)
  def initialize(redirect)
    self.redirect_to = redirect
  end

  def perform(args={})
    self    
  end
end

By creating a UrlJob using the following:

uj = UrlJob::Job.from_object(Redirector.new("http://frison.ca"))

And visiting:

http://localhost:3000/uj/#{uj.token} or http://localhost:3000/uj/#{uj.path} or #{uj.url} (assuming default_url_options[:host] is setup for ActionMailer)

The result will be deserializing the Redirector job, and calling it’s perform method. The perform method must return an object that responds to either: ‘redirect_to’ or ‘render’, and the corresponding action will occur. The perform method will be passed in a dictionary with the following keys:

:ip_address => The ip address of the url visitor
:user_agent => The user agent of the url visitor
:referrer   => The referrer of the url visitor
:token      => The token used to visit the url.

A more interesting example might be an object like:

class Tracker
  def initialize
  end

  def perform(params={})
    @url_job = UrlJob::Job.find_by_token(params[:token])
    UrlTrack.create(:url_job => @url_job,
                    :referrer => params[:referrer],
                    :ip_address => params[:ip_address],
                    :user_agent => params[:user_agent])

    OpenStruct.new({:render => " "})
  end
end

This way you could do something like:

uj = UrlJob::Job.from_object(Tracker.new)

And embed a image tag like:

<img src="http://localhost:3000/uj/#{uj.token}" height="1px" width="1px">

Inside some emails to track some email opens

UrlJob::Job almost exactly a stripped down version of Delayed::Job with a controller

Copyright © 2011 Timothy Frison

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