Rails geocoding gems

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+1 Q:

Rails geocoding gems

I've used GeoKit and acts_as_geocodable in the past. I like GeoKit, but its missing nicer features like named_scopes. I'm not a huge fan of acts_as_geocodable because it duplicates address data into its own table.

Lately, these gems seem under-maintained.

What are some actively maintained gems out there?

+4 A:

I maintain the rails-geocoder gem:

http://gemcutter.org/gems/rails-geocoder

Source code:

http://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder

I can tell you it's actively maintained because I'm working on Rails 3 compatibility as I write this! It's designed to be very simple, while providing the most commonly-used geocoding features. It provides named scopes and doesn't duplicate any data.

Alex Reisner 2010-02-11 02:56:26

Hey that looks nice. I'll give it a shot. Just a quick question: how do I circumvent geocoding if the street address is blank? Does geocoded_by accept an :if option? Or should I call fetch_coordinates in before_save and put the conditional in there?

cotopaxi 2010-02-11 03:35:46

This may be the default behavior in a future version but for now, yes, add an `:if` option to `before_save`.

Alex Reisner 2010-02-11 04:23:24

That would be a nice feature to have. Thanks for your hard work.

cotopaxi 2010-02-11 04:45:12

I was able to implement it easily (only did geocoding, no distance stuff yet) and your code is nice and clean. Thanks again!

cotopaxi 2010-02-11 06:55:55

Thanks! Glad you like it so far. If you install the plugin version (`script/plugin install http://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder.git`) you won't need your `:if` option--it doesn't query Google if the search term (address) is blank. This will be in the next gem release too but that won't be for a few days.

Alex Reisner 2010-02-11 14:37:05

Amazing job on the gem! I've used geokit before but its a real pain with rails 3.
I have 2 questions if it's not too much trouble.

1) Is it possible to do something like this Location.near([lat, lng], 20).order("distance ASC")?
I've had that problem with acts_as_geocodable where it wouldn't recognize the "distance" and couldn't order by it.

2) Say I have a Company model which has many Addresses in the Address Model, how would I have everything geocode in the Address model, but search for Companies within a certain distance from a zipcode?

Any help will be appreciated. Thank you.

felixg 2010-10-06 05:01:05

ansaurus

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Rails geocoding gems

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