Creating a Custom Controller with the Messaging Class
At minimum, a custom controller that uses the Apex Messaging namespace needs a subject, a body, and a recipient for the email. You will need a page that acts as a form to fill out the subject and body and deliver the email.
Create a new page called sendEmailPage and use the following code:
Notice in the page markup that the account ID is retrieved from the URL of the page. For this example to render properly, you must associate the Visualforce page with a valid account record in the URL. For example, if 001D000000IRt53 is the account ID, the resulting URL should be:
Displaying Field Values with Visualforce has more information about retrieving the ID of a record.
The following code creates a controller named sendEmail that implements the Messaging.SingleEmailMessage class, and uses the contacts related to an account as recipients:
Notice in the controller that:
- The subject and body of the email are set through a separate Visualforce page and passed into the controller.
- The method that sends the email is called
send(). This name must match the name of the action for the Visualforce button that sends the email. - The recipients of the email, that is, the email addresses stored in
toAddresses[], come from the addresses of the contacts available in an associated account. When compiling a list of recipients from contacts, leads, or other records, it is a good practice to loop through all the records to verify that an email address is defined for each. The account ID is retrieved from the URL of the page.
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