Geocoder and My Very First Gem Attempt Part 1

I’ve always been weirdly into maps and geography. Back in 2010 I was introduced to Geocaching and, from then on, suspciously looking around from tupperware was one of my new hobbies. A week ago, I presented the web app I worked on for The Flatiron School’s meetup. The app showed the restaurants with the most health code violations in a zip code. I was able to implement a gem I found, called Geocoder, to convert addresses to geographic coordinates for use in the Google Maps API so I could show the exact location of offending restaurants on a map. I didn’t really know too much about Geocoder and was only able to implement one method to find coordinates:

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Geocoder.coordinates("11 broadway, new york, ny") #=> [40.7055269, -74.014346]

But there is a much cooler way to use Geocoder: with ActiveRecord.

If you want to geocode your table en masse, you can add both a latitude and longitude column in your database table connected with ActiveRecord. Then, in your model, add the following lines:

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extend ::Geocoder::Model::ActiveRecord
geocoded_by :address
after_validation :geocode

That first line apparently provides you with the methods you are using on the next two lines. When you add the geocoded_by line, the geocoder uses the column you designate as the input to be geocoded. I’m not exactly sure what after_validation does, but it seems like that it designates the direction of gecoding. Meaning here we are specifying we want to convert an address into coordinates, as Geocoder also can convert coordinates into and address.

So each time I save an element in my table, the geocoder gets the address and fills in the latitude and longitude automatically. I did all these, ran my program, and got this error:

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Google Geocoding API error: over query limit.

You have apparently have to be gentle. So I told my program to wait 5 seconds in-between each geocode so Google wouldn’t be upset at me. It may work with a smaller number of seconds, but 5 seemed to work fine for me. 

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def seed_db
  JSON.parse(RestClient.get(url))["data"].each do |line|
    next if line.last == "Borough"
    f = Firehouse.create
    f.address = "#{line[9]} #{line[10]}, NY"
    f.save
    puts "Geocoding: #{f.address}"
    sleep 5
  end
end

So we’re good! Now we have a database full of addresses and their coordinates.

One more thing I found cool with Geocoder was that you can pass it an external IP address and it also returns coordinates! But don’t think you can stay spying on everyone now, the coordinates that it returns have a margin of error which I found pretty significant for NYC, about a half a mile. For the gem I’m attempting to write, I have used the user’s external IP address as the default starting location for directions to the nearest firehouse.

Speaking of which, I am attemping to use this program as an educational experience in my first gem. Using the near function in Geocoder, I can pass geocoder a location (IP, physical address, landmark, etc.) and it can return the nearest location in our geocoded database. I have the program working, but the transition into a gem has been difficult and clunky. Integrating other gems and using bundler has proved to be a thorn in my gem creation’s side. This is the error I’ve been receiving:

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/Users/caguthrie/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p353/gems/bundler-1.5.2/lib/bundler/shared_helpers.rb:24:in `default_gemfile': Could not locate Gemfile (Bundler::GemfileNotFound)

I’ve been pointing directly to the Gemfile in the gemspec and it doesn’t seem to care. Interestingly enough, the gem works if I run it in the directory where my source files are. However, it does not if I attempt to run it outside that folder. The search continues, I will surely, shortly figure out the solution, then people everywhere around NYC can get google maps’ walking directions to the nearest firehouse. Soon enough.

Wait for part 2 of this blog post when I finally figure out how to create a proper gem.