---
title: Two-way messaging with email - clearbnb - part 21
slug: two-way-messaging-with-email-clearbnb-part-21
published_at: 2022-03-28 04:00:04 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:37 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode, we&#39;ll create a Message object to pass messages between guest and host, using a noticed notification to send an email. #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript]
views: 617
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/two-way-messaging-with-email-clearbnb-part-21
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3XKa3Pto44
youtube_id: E3XKa3Pto44
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/E3XKa3Pto44
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/E3XKa3Pto44/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Two-way messaging with email - clearbnb - part 21

*Published: March 28, 2022*
*Views: 617*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3XKa3Pto44)

[![Two-way messaging with email - clearbnb - part 21](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/E3XKa3Pto44/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3XKa3Pto44)

## Description

In this episode, we&#39;ll create a Message object to pass messages between guest and host, using a noticed notification to send an email.
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

hey what&#39;s up welcome back in this episode you&#39;ll learn about messaging we&#39;re going to set up two-way messaging between a guest and a host as a reminder we&#39;re rebuilding a short-term vacation rental marketplace this is part 21 of the series if you haven&#39;t seen the other videos head back and take a look we&#39;re using ruby on rails and we have this concept of a reservation which is a booking of a property from a guest to a host but what we want to do now is add some messaging so that like the guest can ask the host questions and the host can respond and so yeah that&#39;s what we&#39;re going to do today let&#39;s jump in here we&#39;re going to start with generating a new model called a message and this is going to be something that is related to a probably to a guest and a host but it might be between two different two other users i don&#39;t know so we&#39;re going to say from user and that&#39;s going to be a foreign key we&#39;re also going to say to user and that&#39;s going to be a foreign key uh references and we&#39;re going to have um an optional association to a reservation uh references and finally we&#39;ll just have some content the message content uh and this will just be plain text for now we&#39;re gonna keep it super simple later on we might add i don&#39;t know markdown or some sort of simple formatting so let&#39;s take a look at this migration now there&#39;s a couple things we need to change so from user there is no class or there&#39;s no table in the database called like the from users table or something so what we need to do is instead of just saying foreign key true we need to say two table is users same with two user right because we want the association or we want the foreign key from user to be to the user id table on the or the the id table on the users the id column on the users table all right and then finally for reservation we want that to be nullable so we&#39;re going to make that nullable the string content we should probably not make nullable um and we&#39;ll default to empty empty string or whatever uh timestamps we have timestamps i don&#39;t know like maybe we want like a red at thing um we could figure that out down the road but for now we&#39;re just going to keep it simple and go with this model for messages so we&#39;ll say rails db migrate that&#39;s going to create our our table in the database let&#39;s also create a controller so railsg controller messages and we&#39;re going to need an index page and that&#39;s probably it we&#39;ll we&#39;ll just yeah we&#39;re gonna start really really simple so in the messages uh actually so let&#39;s start by going to yeah the um the reservation show page and on the reservation show page we want some way to link to the messages for a reservation so we&#39;re going to say the messages path and we&#39;re going to pass in the reservation id so that we know which reservation we&#39;re messaging about but i don&#39;t know in practice we might want to be able to support messaging again between two users but for now um we&#39;ll just make it pretty dependent on a reservation also before we go too far let&#39;s go back to that message model and make sure that we have this all all the associations set up um we actually don&#39;t need the foreign key here because uh actually yeah this is good to talk about so the foreign key right we would need to specify the foreign key if the actual column in the database was not the same as the association name with underscore id at the end so because it is we don&#39;t actually need that but when we go over to the user model like on the other side of the association we need to come in here and we want to actually add two different associations to a message so a a user is going to have some messages that they sent they&#39;re also going to have messages they received so here we&#39;re going to say has many like sent messages and because sent messages is not the class name we need to specify the class name and the foreign key etc etc in this case the foreign key for sent messages is going to be the from underscore user underscore id so from user id same thing for received messages and this is going to be the two user id okay i think that&#39;s a good start i think we also want to mark this one as optional but um yeah that&#39;s that&#39;s a good start for now okay let&#39;s talk about our um yeah let&#39;s just go to the messages index and we&#39;ll i mean yeah i guess we can start with just a form here uh form that&#39;s gonna make a uh post request to slash messages uh i don&#39;t know that&#39;s like way longer why don&#39;t i don&#39;t know like if yeah this is like totally fine to hard code the path it&#39;s smaller it&#39;s like whatever and yeah we&#39;ll just use what they say form uh think you github copilot um i don&#39;t know we don&#39;t we don&#39;t need oh gosh that csrf thing is from um uh it&#39;s from django uh name is authenticity token and then the value okay so it&#39;s like why are you writing html directly inside of erb um because i think a lot of people use the form helpers i don&#39;t use form helpers um uh yeah i think the reason that i don&#39;t use form helpers uh so like in ruby you can say like form four uh message like at message or something and uh do f and then you can like use um you can use this form helper to print out like labels and inputs but i don&#39;t i don&#39;t use this form 4 because i want full control over my html and also because it makes it easier to convert if you want to switch to a front-end framework later so if we say oh we actually want to like replace all of our front end here with a react app and we want to just swap all our back end to be rendering json so that it&#39;s easy to i don&#39;t know prototype faster or whatever we already have the html and it just makes it a little bit easier to swap over um i don&#39;t know content content and then we&#39;ll just say this is the message and we&#39;d actually don&#39;t want this to be a text input we want this to be a text area and let&#39;s see so the name is actually going to be message content and then we also want to have a hidden input for the reservation id so this is going to be the messages reservation id and recall that we just we just included that in the query string so we&#39;re gonna say the value is at reservation.id and if we come over here i don&#39;t think we have any message or like yeah there is no route because we don&#39;t have that in our routes file so we need to go to our routes file and we need to add messages here so uh resources messages only uh index and create i guess let&#39;s see okay and now it&#39;s saying that the the id for this at reservation instance variable is nil that&#39;s because we didn&#39;t actually specify that in the messages controller so at reservation is so what we could do is just say reservation dot find params uh message reservation id if we had one in the query string um params what uh params oh right uh params hmm oh params here this should just be params reservation i do like this okay um but we don&#39;t want someone to be able to message about a reservation that they are not a part of so this means like if we did it like this then any user could message about any other reservation they could just come up here and type in one or i don&#39;t know what a 49 they could type in any reservation id and start talking about someone else&#39;s reservation we don&#39;t want to do that and so what we want to do instead is we want to make sure that we&#39;re scoping the reservations that they&#39;re allowed to talk about and only only letting them sort of view this page if they yeah have uh have access to that reservation because they&#39;re either the guest or they are the host so this is going to be a little bit more fun sort of active record stuff because if you recall the reservation has the guest id but it does not have the host id has the guest id and it has the listing id and through the listing we know the host but it&#39;s not as simple as doing something like reservation dot where like uh you know user is current user or something like that dot find and imp like usually what we might do is something like current user.reservations.find right and that would give us back uh all of the reservations for the current user but if we look at the user model right now the user model has both reservations and host reservations and at this point what we actually want is the combination of both of them and we want to do the combination of both of them in a way that doesn&#39;t require like too much pain and so what i think we might want to do is add another method on the user model that will return the combination of these two associations and what i think we can do is just make a method down here self dot or yeah we can just call it like all reservations and what this will do is this i mean we don&#39;t we also don&#39;t want to just say reservations plus host reservations because uh i don&#39;t think yeah i don&#39;t think this is going to work because there is no right there is no method id on reservation um all reservations dot find i okay so let&#39;s let&#39;s look at what happens here so u is user.first u.reservations is some list of reservations u.reservations.count is 12. but u.reservations.class is a an active record association collection proxy thing so we&#39;re getting back uh some some sort of like active record collection type object that comes back and then if we do uh host reservations host reservations.class similarly we&#39;re getting back a collection proxy but if we do the the concatenation of the two u plus reservations we get back a an array i believe so if we say like dot class we get back an array object an array is not an active record collection and that means that we don&#39;t have a an easy like collection query method that&#39;s going to go in and query the database with that id so what we want to do instead is we actually want to say something like reservation.where the guest is self okay that&#39;s going to give us all of the reservations on the guest side so that is basically just like self.reservations and then what we can do is say like dot or reservation.where listing is in listings and i think this should give us all the reservations so if we go again uh reload and say you dot reservations dot count and u.hostreservations.com so we have 12 and 15 and then if we say u dot all reservations uh method missing um is it not called that all reservations reload u is user.first dot count we get back 15 huh i think let&#39;s see okay so guess that example.com should have four reservations so if we find user.last is guess at example.com u.allreservations.com four okay great so if we look at the query here select count star from reservations where the reservation guest id is is the id of the guest or reservations.listing id is in the sub query select listing.id from listings where the host id is 2. so this gives us all of the reservations so now what we want to do is go back to our messages controller and say yeah that should actually work now so if we go to i don&#39;t know for instance this message or this booking and go to messages now this should um this should only work for the reservations that we&#39;re a part of so if we go to like i don&#39;t know reservation 33 that should return like a 404 right if if there is reservation 33 so reservation dot fine 33 nope reservation dot uh find 34 39 okay 39 they&#39;re not related okay so reservation 39 definitely exists but this guest or this this user is not part of that reservation so they&#39;re not able to see it in uh in production they would see a 404 page here which is what we want to see they are part of reservation 50. okay whatever let&#39;s try sending a message so if we click uh send there is no create mess create method inside the messages controller so we&#39;re going to say um yeah def create and what we want to do is we want to create a new message so at message is equal to currentuser.sent messages.new message params and message params is going to be something like this params.require message.permit we&#39;re going to permit the content and the reservation id okay so now what we want to say is the the messages um to user so the person that we&#39;re sending it to is going to be um the person that is the on the the opposite person on the reservation so if we&#39;re sending from the guest this should be the host if we&#39;re sending from the host this should be the guest so we actually need the reservation so we&#39;re going to find the reservation again and this is now going to be through message params and when we find the reservation we&#39;re going to say at reservation dot if the guest is equal to the current user then we&#39;re going to use the host otherwise we&#39;re going to use the guest and then we&#39;re going to say if we can save if we can&#39;t save the message we&#39;ll print some errors otherwise we will we will redirect to the messages path for reservation id reservation.id all right let&#39;s see if that worked okay so i think that might have actually gone through message.last okay there is one message there&#39;s the content it&#39;s for reservation 50 there&#39;s the from user to user cool now in practice in our messages controller or our message in our message model we should have a validation here that&#39;s like the from user is on the reservation and the to user is on the reservation but whatever we&#39;ll just save that validation as an exercise for the reader okay so messages controller inside of the index we also want some list of messages so at messages is reservation.messages does that uh association exist no so reservation has many messages and now that we have that we can go back to our uh reserve or our messages index and add that list to the top here all right so we&#39;re gonna just iterate over uh messages.each message i feel like github co-pilot is like drunk this morning or something uh it&#39;s like it&#39;s thinks we&#39;re writing php or something else all right so now we can see the messages that were sent so here&#39;s um another message from [Music] yeah from whoever i don&#39;t know so we see test we see another message from let&#39;s see if we can find a tailwind ui component that will make this look pretty there is some set of lists somewhere so let&#39;s see if we can find some uh yeah or feeds maybe a feed oh this is cool all right yeah let&#39;s do this we&#39;ll copy the html and then let&#39;s just drop it in here and what is this going to look like well we will drop in yeah so for each message that&#39;s what we want to do is that first li i think and then i think we can just delete the rest of this down to here and see what that looks like so if we refresh okay cool so i don&#39;t know who eduardo is but um we should probably make that like the guest&#39;s name or email or something so eduardo eduardo this is going to be like message message.fromuser.email so this is the user that sent the email and then commented or maybe let&#39;s call this like sent and then oh there&#39;s a really cool thing we can do in rails to get this so time ago in words is a helper method and we can pass in a date time so if we pass in i don&#39;t know message.created at that should give us like when it was created yeah so sent three minutes ago that&#39;s so cool and then the content here will just be the message.content and we can&#39;t actually trust that the user is not going to put in some like i don&#39;t know script source is like my evil script or something um so like cross-site script forgery right what if they&#39;re gonna try to do something fancy like this well it&#39;s fine because we&#39;re not actually going to like render out that stuff we definitely want to avoid the double equals though because then it does inject it but um yeah this is this is fine uh i don&#39;t know a little miniature security lesson uh i don&#39;t like how this looks the form looks funky and we have like this extra line here i don&#39;t know where this line comes from but uh let&#39;s see if we can figure out what the deal is with this so if we inspect this how do we get this line to go away and how do we have our message sort of or our text area show up below i think yeah there&#39;s a text area thing so let&#39;s maybe yeah let&#39;s copy this puppy all right and we&#39;ll come down here and make this our text area gosh isn&#39;t tailwind the best add or like you add your message and then the name is just going to be message content and that should be fine and if we refresh our page okay so now we have this giant input box and a send button um yeah sure but again we have like this line that&#39;s sort of showing over the top of our stuff so is that why is that where is that coming from um oh span absolute blah blah blah so there&#39;s some span that&#39;s in the in the last li we want to remove this span i think um but we don&#39;t want to lose it on all of the other ones so how do we want to do that well one way we could do this is say like um if yeah we can do we can do each with index or something i can&#39;t remember if the index is first or last but let&#39;s see if like i is equal to at messages dot length minus one then or like if it&#39;s less than messages dot length then show it uh explicitly less than there we go okay so now sort of our line sort of stops before our form starts that&#39;s nice i like that and it looks pretty clean the other thing is that we want some space between our form and this thing so where we see add your message yeah our form here needs a little bit of breathing room so let&#39;s give it that class like margin top is six or something all right that&#39;s pretty good our send button needs to be improved uh i don&#39;t know like whatever we haven&#39;t really styled a ton of this stuff but um this should all just work okay so now we can we can send messages from the guest but let&#39;s log in as the the host of this reservation and see if we can get this working so this is from wave plus guest at cgi.dev okay when the guest or when the host logs in i think this is the one no the maybe this is the one i don&#39;t know let&#39;s see messages uh it was actually like reservation 50. okay it&#39;s not okay reservation 50 was not for that host let&#39;s log in again as wave at see jab dot all right if we look at the reservations the most recent reservation actually we&#39;re just going to like messages reservation id 50. so we see the guest is talking to us they&#39;re trying to contact us hello there welcome to the property uh enjoy your stay something something something right this is the message from the host so now we see the message coming in from the host cool now we have sort of two-way messaging but it&#39;s awful because in order to see what messages came up two things have to happen number one they have to log in to the application and like go to the messages page and two they have to keep refreshing the page also this is a little funky so let&#39;s let&#39;s give that some space too uh class is like text to xl and i don&#39;t know like margin bottom six i don&#39;t know let&#39;s see all right that&#39;s looking good okay so the first thing we want to do is when a message is sent let&#39;s use that notice gem to actually like send the message as an email so let&#39;s go over to our message model and we&#39;re going to add an after create commit after create commit we&#39;re going to say notify um the to user and this is going to be like some notification thing so we&#39;ll say rails g noticed notification message or like new message okay new message is going to be this new type of notification message mailer and it&#39;s going to require the message uh okay rails um let&#39;s see so in order to get that working rails g mailer message mailer and we&#39;re going to say like new message and we&#39;ll open that up and we&#39;re going to have the message here from params message and r2 is going to be the at message.2 user.email subject is going to be a new message from fromuser.email um we have the name on the user model but we&#39;re not using it anywhere so whatever um so new message dot html so we&#39;re gonna say like new message and then we&#39;ll just print the message here um okay and is that all we need i don&#39;t know new message me uh like notification i don&#39;t remember i don&#39;t know if we need to like actually say new message here or not if there&#39;s only one method on the mailer but let&#39;s just let&#39;s just test this out and see what happens all right so testing notification let&#39;s see um nothing happened huh oh you know what we didn&#39;t actually wire it up so in the message object yeah so notify user this needs to be like new message dot with so like message is self dot deliver deliver later to the to user all right let&#39;s try this again testing notification again boom we have a new new message okay so and it was sent to the guest fantastic okay so we&#39;ve got messaging sort of like at least it&#39;s sending the message to the guest when they are receiving um when they&#39;re receiving a message about a notif or about a a reservation let&#39;s log back out log back in as the guest just to make sure that it works um totally should work nothing is different at this point between the um between the guest and the host in terms of like the message sending um hey host did you get this one and we say send hey new message hey host did you get this one cool super cool um all right so yeah we have sort of two-way messaging working i guess in the next episode we might want to make it so that if someone is on this page they are able to see the new messages pop up so we&#39;ll have to use a little bit of turbo and some fun stuff like that but yeah just looking at our plan here we&#39;ve got two-way two-way messaging we don&#39;t really have canned responses or scheduled or translations uh but we&#39;re we&#39;re making our way through all of the content here i think another fun one would be to uh i guess this is also checked another one would be to have when you receive an email to be able to respond to that email and have that show up in the messages so maybe we can use the action mailer or action mailbox stuff for that i also really want to play with the twilio api so text messaging the host when they receive a booking instead of just emailing um yeah when they get a booking or when they receive a message that would be great and yeah i think otherwise we&#39;re looking pretty good so we probably want some way to have a guest like leave a review when they&#39;re done or i don&#39;t know but we&#39;re we&#39;re definitely getting closer to having a pretty complete application here so thanks so much for watching and we&#39;ll see in the next one [Music]

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