CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railslocationuniquelookup
Peter Ehrlich
Peter Ehrlich

Reputation: 7135

globally unique location id

I'm trying to find a good way to store and connect users based upon their city.

Location names can come from a variety of places, including facebook connection, ip lookup, and event user input.

I want to be able to input an address and get back a unique location ID. NY and New York will be understood as the same, but cities in two locations are not understood as the same.

Can I use facebook's location databse for this? Or google's location api? Or would it be better to roll my own, doing searches and filtering to consecutively narrow down results, from country to state to city, while normalizing for abbreviations, internationalizations, and typos? Or is there a plugin that will do this for me?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 207

Answers (1)

santuxus
santuxus

Reputation: 3702

I would use https://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder . In general you have to add latitude and longitude to your model (they will identify location) and then specify which field should be geocoded. It allows you to store locations from different sources: city name, ip address and others. There are many configuration options (eg. you can specify Geocoding Services). Check out the gem readme page for all the details.

Upvotes: 0

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