CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsgoogle-api
Shurick
Shurick

Reputation: 27

Ruby on Rails. Using Google Client API to parse emails

I am new to Ruby and have a question about how to do a specific task on Rails.

I have a list of inventory and each item has a specific Stock ID that is emailed to my personal Gmail account. I want my web application to listen for emails from a specific email account. When my gmail receives an email from that specific account I want my application to parse it for a couple of fields and insert the stock ID into my database.

For example: Let's say my database has an item with style code: A5U31 and size:10. The email will say something like item with style code: A5U31 and size:10 has Stock ID:329193020. I want my Rails application to search the database for an entry with that specific style code and size, and when it finds an entry to simply insert the stock ID into the row.

I am trying to using the Google-API-Client gem to this, but I am struggling, because I am still a beginner. So far I have done this quick-start guide to authenticate my gmail account with my rails app.

https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/quickstart/ruby?authuser=2

If someone could help me figure out how to write this sort of code and where to put it in my app(models, controllers, views) that would be very appreciated. Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 396

Answers (1)

Matt B
Matt B

Reputation: 116

I know it's been several months since you posted this, so you probably already have it worked out, but in case you still need a solution (or if someone else wants to do something similar), I'll share my thoughts:

At a high level, it sounds like your plan is

  1. Identify when a new email has come in (either by polling or by using a push notification).
  2. Grab the new email's content.
  3. Parse the email's content in order to extract relevant data.
  4. Use the data to query and update a database.

Based on the documentation for the Gmail API, it does look like you should be able to set up push notifications, so you won't have to poll the endpoint to get the information you need.

However, my big takeaway from this list is that none of the items on it really require Rails, since you're not exposing an external web API for requests. I suppose that you could leverage ActiveRecord to create an item model and use that to manage the database; however, since it seems like you'd only need to make some basic SQL queries (and the same ones each time), I'm not sure that bringing in ActiveRecord adds much value.

If I were trying to solve this problem myself, I would probably create a simple Ruby program that (a) uses the gem you mentioned to handle push notifications from the Gmail API, and (b) uses another gem to connect to whatever kind of database you're using (e.g. pg for Postgres) and make the necessary queries.

(All of this assumes, of course, that you aren't specifically using Rails for some other reason, e.g. adding this feature to an existing Rails application).

Upvotes: 1

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