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!
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
Identify when a new email has come in (either by polling or by using a push notification).
Grab the new email's content.
Parse the email's content in order to extract relevant data.
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).
Related
I have problem during using fire-base with rails to making a real time form in rails with fire-base how it will be done .. please help me i am new in fire-base.
How to make a real time sharing form in Rails using fire-base.
sorry for bad English ;)
It would be good if you can use ids as keys for each of your form element like input ,select etc and can place value for the element to make each key-value pairs.
This would be effective in a case when you have a persistent record for that form i.e for make new records this approach is not good.
You can use the firebase-rails gem, it's description reads as follows: Ruby
wrapper for the Firebase REST API.
Changes are sent to all subscribed clients automatically, so you can
update your clients in realtime from the backend.
It's very easy to use, although the documentation is somewhat lack luster for but it's just enough for a simple app (if you don't know what you're doing).
I'm currently implementing a very basic IMAP client into an application I'm building in Rails. I'm using the Mail gem which supplies lots of useful ways of parsing the imap data.
I'd like to store the Mail object that it's generating in the database. Is that possible?
i.e.
email = Email.new
email.uid = id
email.mail = Mail.new(imap.fetch(id, "RFC822")[0]["attr"]["RFC822"]
email.save
It's a convenience thing where I don't want to have to download the object again unless I have to since performance on the IMAP call is slow, but I'd like to be able to have it there to look back on (and do any breaking down I needed to later).
I could then call
email.find(x).mail.body
and various other useful things without having to build out that functionality in my own email model.
Q1: How would I set up the active record model?
Q1a: Would I be better off doing something that excluded the attachments to make it an easier object to store? (is that even possible?)
Appreciate your help,
Several database schemata have been developed to store mail. I've worked on one, and there are others. Believe me, it's hard work. The result can be very useful, but since your question doesn't focus on the result I suspect it's not worthwhile in your case.
You might find it easier to use a json library to write your object graph to a file with an automatically inferred structure, as most json libraries seem to support these days. That won't let you do as much, but it's very much easier and lets you store both completely and incompletely retrieved messages. If you haven't fetched a particular body part, the json library will just write a null for that field.
It depends on what you want to do with the stored mails. If you need only specific parts of the mail to be easily accessible trough the database you won't need a complex setup like archiveopteryx, which basically maps a complete representation of emails to relational database tables. In most cases though you won't need that much detail and it will be totally perfect to use a simple data model.
A1: rails g model Email from to subject date:datetime message_id body. this are just the basic parts, should get you started.
A1a: You don't need to store the attachments if you don't want to. If you need them, you'll probably be better off not storing them in the database itself. Attachments are just like uploads so there are plenty of gems that can help you do that (https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/rails_file_uploads).
Using posgres jsonb columns, you can store the email as json, in my case I disregard the attachments (which I store the reference to and retrieve as and when required).
This works pretty well with the Mail gem.
I am developing something with ejabberd server. I came to the need of changing the subscription logic. I am using ejabberd-2.1.11
My need is on how the subscription works, I would like to change the logic so that users upload their roster contact with subscription both automatically and and save in in the rosterusers table-colum subscription immediately to be B. So that they should be able to see online and in their contacts at least when the first one has already registered to the server. ( hope this make sense for you and is valid)
I am a very beginner in erlang and ejabberd architecture but I have already developed some basic modules, my question to you is if you could help me on this regard, how difficult is to make this change and if you could give me some hints where the changes would be
I'd stay away from modifying the server, it conforms to standards and follows the specification. So if you ever need to move to another server or upgrade, you know it's just going to work.
What you would do to achieve this is implement this behavior on the client using the server's features.
If you are really sure you want to modify the server, mod_roster.erl is the file you want to be looking at.
If using an external DB, you can also modify the DB directly, but changes won't be reflected until the clients log back in.
I love graphs.
I'd love to get my hands on some data and make it look pretty. But alas, I'm a little lost on what would be considered best practice.
I've selected mixpanel (only as an example) as I seems wonderfully easy to track custom events, and doesn't have any subdomain limitation like Google Analytics.
Say I had 100-1000+ users who have an account (which is publicly facing), and I'm currently tracking the public interactions their pages get. With mixpanel, I can see the data which is lovely, and I've segmented it to individual accounts. So far, so good!
But then, I want to show my users this information. And here my head begins to hurt. Do I schedule a cron jobs, pulling in the data from mixpanel and writing it to their respective accounts? Or is there a better way? I've looked into mixpanel's api (I'm using Ruby), but they keep telling me I should use the javascript api. But in using JS, how does one prevent others getting the data (ie. what's stopping someone faking mixpanel api-posts in the console, or viewing my private key?).
What would you consider a practical solution in such a case?
You can achieve this by storing the user specific events of each user with a $bucket property attached which has a value unique to each user as explained in the mixpanel docs here Mixpanel docs. If you want to still use ruby to serve the events, have a look at Mixpanel's recommended ruby client libraries
mixpanel_client looks like the much maintained option of the 2 mentioned. If you go with that then you can serve user specific events as shown in the example below(which is also in the gem's readme):
data = client.request do
# Available options
resource 'events/properties'
event '["test-event"]'
name 'hello'
values '["uno", "dos"]'
timezone '-8'
type 'general'
unit 'hour'
interval 24
limit 5
bucket 'contents'
from_date '2011-08-11'
to_date '2011-08-12'
on 'properties["product_id"]'
where '1 in properties["product_id"]'
buckets '5'
end
You could try a service like Keen IO that will allow you to generate encrypted scoped write and read API keys. Keen IO is built for customizable and programmatic analytics features such as exposing analytics to your customers, where as MixPanel is more for exploring your data in their UI. The idea with an encrypted scoped key is they will never be able to access your account, only the data you want them to see. You could easily tag your events with a customer ID and then use the Scoped Keys to ensure that you only ever show customers their own data.
https://keen.io/docs/security/#scoped-key
Also, Keen IO has an "importer" which allows you to export your mixpanel events into your Keen IO database.
I need to develop an application which should help me in getting all the status,messages from different servers like Twitter,facebook etc in my application and also when i post a message it should gets updated in all the services. I am using authlogic for authentication. Can anyone suggest me what gems/plug-ins i can use..
I need API help to get all the tweets/messages to be displayed in my application and also ways to post the messages to the corresponding services by posting it from my application. Can anyone help me from design point.
Walk through what you'd want to do in your head. Imagine the working site, imagine your webapp working before you start. So your user logs in (handled by authlogic) and sees a textbox called "What are you doing right now?". The user fills in a status message and clicks "post". The status message appears at the top of their previously posted messages.
Start with the easy part. Create a class that posts to two services. Use the twitter gem and rfacebook to post to two already defined services. In the future, you'll want to let the user associate services to their account and you would iterate through the associated services and post the message to each. Once you have this working, you can refactor or polish the UI a bit to round out this feature. I personally would do the "add a social media account to my profile" feature towards the end.
Harder is the reading of the data (strangely enough) because you're going to have to figure out how to store it. You could store nothing but I suspect you'd run into API limits just searching all the time (could design around this). I would keep a little cache of posts associated to the user's social media account. In this way, the data model would look like this:
A user has many social media accounts.
A social media account has many posts. (cache)
Of course, now you need to schedule the caching of the posts. This could be done manually, based on an event (like when they login) or time based. So when the update happens, you load up the posts for that social media account and the user will see the posts the next time they hit the page. For real-time push to the client's browser while they stare at the screen, use faye (non-trivial) and ajax to pull the new posts to the top of the social media stream view.
The time based one is tricky because you'd either have to have a cron job run or have rails handle it all with a gem like clockwork. But then you have to leave rails running. I've also solved this by having a class in /lib do all the work and a simple web call kicks off the update. But it wasn't in a multi-user use case. So that might not work. In any case, you'll want to have some nice reusable code for these problems since update requests can come from many different sources.
You'll also have to deal with the API limits. When pulling down content from twitter, you won't get everything. That will just have to be known by the user or you'll have to indicate a "break in time" somehow.
The UI should be pretty easy (functionally anyway), because you know which source the post/content is coming from. It'd be easy to throw a little icon next to the post to display which social media site it's coming from.
Anyway, good luck, sounds like a fun project.