The app I'm building needs to be able to match up users to events based on the city/town they're in. I'm still relatively new to Rails and completely new to Geolocation and using locations in an app. I'd figured on a design where users have one or many cities, and events would have one city which I'd hoped to extract without specifically asking the user for it, by getting it from the event address entered.
Mostly to provide some outside checking to help get the address entered correctly and consistently, but also to show a map, I installed this jquery address picker (https://github.com/sgruhier/jquery-addresspicker). Unfortunately the data returned by Google doesn't include a city but a "locality" or an "administrative area" that doesn't correlate reliably to city names. The localities being returned are more like what we in my home town would call "suburbs". What I need to procure is a city so I can allow users to search all events in their city rather than just the ones in their suburb.
Can anyone offer advice on how I could go about doing this? Many thanks.
Edit: Should maybe add that I'm wanting to do geocoding client-side so I don't run into problems with Google Maps limits or have to pay for geocoding etc.
There are some gems that provide you with that and may others geo related features, like calculating distances.
Here are the 2 most famous: https://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder and https://github.com/imajes/geokit
In the future I highly recommend you to head to https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ to see what is available as a gem already and see what is the most popular at the moment.
For raw address info, use Google Maps API Reverse Geocoding which accepts lat/lon inputs and returns street address components. Modern browsers support location awareness (geolocation), with user permission, and will give you a lat/lon that "tends to be close" to where the browser is. That will probably get you a correct city/town in most cases.
The maps API is part of Google's broad suite of API tools -- there are gems that handle any Google API (well, most of them), or check out Google Maps for Rails, which will at the very least give you a good head start on how to use the API.
But if you're looking to validate postal code, this method will come up short, since the location awareness will vary in accuracy depending on browser, device (more accurate for mobile), the connection, population density, network coverage, and so on. Also, calling the
If you can get GPS-accurate lat/lon then it will be much more accurate ... except in some cases like in large cities, a single building will have its own postal code, so a few feet one way or the other might matter.
Related
I'm working on an app which utilizes Google Places API in order to find locations based on a users search. I've implemented the search with the help of the UIAutocomplete (Google Places), but unfortunately, it is not location based (until the user provides authorization). I was wondering if there is a way to get the users location through their IP address or otherwise using Swift. I don't need a precise location, the city would be enough.
I've searched for a while and there doesn't seem to be any other way of doing this, so if you know of an API which can return the city the user is currently in, that would be great.
Thanks for all the help,
Vlad
I don't think the system frameworks allow you to get the user's remote IP address anymore. A solution for you might be to use a website like http://mylocation.org/, which shows your IP address and location. Perhaps you can make a request to this website and parse out the HTML that comes back to get the location. Please note, this isn't the most accurate way of getting the user's location and you would be much better off using the CoreLocation framework.
I am developing an iPhone app for iOS 6.1 or later. I would like to have a feature that would provide the user a list of addresses that are nearby. I know I can use a geocoder with a reverseGeocodeLocation call to get the address of a specific latitude/longitude. But what I need is not just that address, but also, a few (maybe 10) addresses that are near that address.
The MKLocalSearchRequest doesn't seem to support any kind of search request that would return that information. (I am not searching for hotels, or restaurants, etc., just any valid nearby addresses) Does anyone know of a way to do this?
There's no API for that, the only thing I can think of is using a for loop and increasing manually latitude/longitude and reverse geocoding.
After doing more research into other map API's from third parties (Google, Mapquest, Bing) I have still been unable to find one that provides this functionality. The answer to my question therefore appears to be that it currently can't be done. The only solution to my problem was to have a complete list of addresses geocoded in a database. (Fortunately for me, my organization has such a database available.)
I'm starting a new rails project that integrates closely with Google Maps. When a user searches for a city, I'm trying to decide whether to geocode the address on the fly (using Google's Geocoding API) or to look up the city in a database pre-populated with lat/long. After I have the lat/long I will plot it on Google Maps.
Which do you think would perform better? With the database lookup, the table would have to be pretty large to account for all the cities I would need and I would have to fallback on the geocoding API anyway for any cities that I don't have in my database.
I wasn't sure if there is a common practice to this or not. I don't need a user's specific location, but just a city they are searching for.
The size of the table is no problem, as long as you index on the city name.
Performance of indexed database queries outspeed web API access by far.
An other point is, that you have better controll of the found data. For example, if you find more than one matching city, you can provide a choice of your DB entries, while Google sometimes reports none or some random (or at least unexpected) search result.
This is, why I had to change to a DB search first strategy in one of my project: Google somtimes didn't find my customers addresses but something total different (i.e. small villages with the same name as the expected bigger one)
Why not do both?
Have the address's geocoded information in your database as "Address Cache" and then call the Google Maps Geocode API only if the address doesn't already exist in your database. That's the approach I used in my Google Maps to SugarCRM integration. It works well. BTW, the Google Maps Geocode API is impressively fast, so users rarely notice. Yet, there is a 2,500/day limit on request and it's also throttled to about 10 requests per second. So, considering those limits, I think a combination database/geocode approach is much better in the long run.
https://github.com/jjwdesign/JJWDesign-Google-Maps
How do I go about displaying content based on a users location ? For ex. If somebody accesses the site from the New York , I would like to display New York Hotels . However if somebody accesses the site from Chicago , I would like to display Chicago hotels.
You're looking for a Geoloction database which would give you access to the typical IP ranges for the countries/cities you need to flag.
This is not absolute or completely trustworthy information though. Country level geo-location is mostly effective but anything like city/state/zip code level information should be treated with great caution.
I've worked with major multinational media providers using expensive paid services and discovered that the information in these databases is a very long way from correct and that users individual circumstances often prevent geo-location from being effective.
e.g. Virgin and East Coast trains in the UK use T-Mobile Germany as their onboard internet provider so you appear to be in Germany to many sites and payment processors.
There are quite a few free geolocation databases, MaxMind springs to mind (though this is not a recommendation of their service).
You can find some thoughts on implementing geo-location here
You need some database/api with information about hotells in different locations, then you need to now where the visitor is.
You can use something like Travel/Hotel API's? to find hotells.
And for finding the location of your visitor you can use something like http://www.hostip.info/use.html
or you can use HTML5 geolocation api example http://html5demos.com/geo . The bad thing with the html5 geo api is that the user need to accept before you get their location.
Remember that there is no guaranty that the location is correct...
This is the exact reason I created wpgeocode. WPGeocode is a free plugin for wordpress that enables publishers to customize content based on reader location. Check out the plugin at the support site at http://www.wpgeocode.com
The plugin enables shortcodes that can be placed in your posts or pages. There are many conditional shortcodes such as [wpgc_is_country_code country_code="US"] for this exact purpose. Simple open the shortcode, specify the target country_code and provide the content to be displayed if the reader is visiting from that specific country.
Visit http://www.wpgeocode.com/shortcodes for a complete listing - here are a few:
[wpgc_is_city_and_state city=”Yardley” state_code=”PA”]
[wpgc_is_ip” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx”]
[wpgc_is_ips” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx,aa.bb.cc.dd”]
[wpgc_is_not_ip” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx”]
[wpgc_is_not_ips” ip=”xx.xx.xx.xx,aa.bb.cc.dd”]
[wpgc_is_city” city=””]
[wpgc_is_cities” cities=”city one,city two,city three”]
[wpgc_is_not_city” city=””]
[wpgc_is_not_cities” cities=”city
one,city two,city three”]
[wpgc_is_nearby”] – Uses the value you
specify in the Nearby Range setting from the administrative panel
[wpgc_is_not_nearby”]
[wpgc_is_within” miles=”10″]
[wpgc_is_within
kilometers=”12″]
[wpgc_is_country_name” country_name=””]
[wpgc_is_country_names” country_name=”United States,Egypt,Albania”]
[wpgc_is_country_code” country_code=””]
[wpgc_is_country_codes”
country_codes=”US,GB,AZ”]
[wpgc_is_state_code” state_code=””]
[wpgc_is_state_codes” state_codes=”PA,NJ,TX”]
[wpgc_is_not_country_name” country_name=””]
[wpgc_is_not_country_names” country_names=”United
States,Egypt,Albania”]
[wpgc_is_not_country_code” country_code=””]
[wpgc_is_not_country_codes” country_codes=”US,GB,AZ”]
[wpgc_is_not_state_code” state_code=””]
[wpgc_is_not_state_codes”
state_codes=”PA,NJ,TX”]
dotCMS offers the ability to geolocate content OTB (disclaimer, I work for them). You can see a demonstration that displays news content based on the user's location onthe demo site:
It is pretty easy to setup and use. Any type of content can be geolocated and the content can be accessed through the RESTful API. Under the covers, the Geolocation queries are handled natively via Elasticsearch.
Example:
http://demo.dotcms.com/demos/content-geolocation
Docs:
http://dotcms.com/docs/latest/es-geolocation-queries
There are a lot of geocode services out there (like http://geo-autocomplete.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demo/ui.demo.html for example) where user can write a location (or part of it) and it will be resolved to real existing location.
There is also a lot of info provided with the search result (like country ISO code, coordinates, etc..), but none of the services seem to provide country and city code.
What I mean is a code used to phone to certain are. For example Country code for Germany will be 49 and for city of Dusseldorf will be 211.
Is there any service, where I can get this info from the user input. Or is there any way to combine the two. For example I get city name from google geocode service and the try it on some city codes database. If yes, can anyone please provide me with links.
You can use for instance Yahoo's GeoPlanet. For more elaboration on services to solve your problem you might want to check out this answer on gis.stackexchange.com, which seems to cover the kind of service you need.