Geokit and Authlogic, geocoding the users ip address when they create a user

Question

Has anyone done this? I'm confused at how I can make this work, first off I have my user model

Geocoding with it works fine in IRB, just can't figure out how to get it to work in my project.

Trying to use some examples from the readme here: http://github.com/andre/geokit-rails/tree/master.

Anyhow here is what I have:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  # geokit
  acts_as_mappable

  after_save :locate

  def locate
    location = Geokit::Geocoders::MultiGeocoder.geocode("12.12.12.12")
  end

end

This corresponds with my save action in my userController, I need to do this after save because authlogic provides the IP after it saves the user or session. I think eventually I'll make it a background process, but till then how can I get this to work? I have a location column in the user model that I'll store the results of geocode()

Also right now I just have some arbitrary IP address "12.12.12.12" but it should actually be current_login_ip

Answer 1

Haven't used geokit myself so can't comment. But thought that I should mention that HTML 5 supporting browsers (e.g. Firefox 3.5) support the geolocation API in case you weren't aware.

Answer 2

Check out this site:

http://geokit.rubyforge.org/readme.html

Scroll down to the IP Geocoding and IP Geocoding Helper sections.

"You can obtain the location for an IP at any time using the geocoder as in the following example:"

location = IpGeocoder.geocode('12.215.42.19')

"where Location is a GeoLoc instance containing the latitude, longitude, city, state, and country code. Also, the success value is true."

Once you get your GeoLoc, just pull your User model, set its long/lat columns and save it.

GeoLoc doc: http://geokit.rubyforge.org/api/geokit-gem/Geokit/GeoLoc.html

Am I missing something?