Question

I have imported a .csv file of 10,000 locations and I need to loop through the database and geocode_by a few fields rather than the usual “geocode_by :address”

I am using the geocoder gem.

My database scheme looks like this

    create_table "locations", :force => true do |t|
      t.string   "Address"
      t.string   "City"
      t.string   "State"
      t.string   "Zip"
      t.float    "latitude"
      t.float    "longitude"
      t.datetime "created_at"
      t.datetime "updated_at"
    end 

Can I do this in a controller action rather than on validation?
Should I do something like this:

 def index
    @locations = Location.all
    @locations.each do |l|
        new_address = "#{l.Address} #{l.City} #{l.State}"
        geocode_by = :new_address
    end
 end

But yea, any help is greatly appreciated, thank you!

Answer 1

I was able to get things working with this controller code:

  def index
    if params[:search].present?
      @locations = Location.near(params[:search], 20, :order => :distance)
    else
      @locations = Location.all
      @locations.each do |l|
        if l.latitude.nil?
          new_location = "#{l.HP_Address_1} #{l.HP_City} #{l.HP_State}"
          s = Geocoder.search(new_location)
          l.latitude = s[0].latitude
          l.longitude = s[0].longitude
          l.save
        end
      end
    end
  end

It loops through every entry in the database, and if the latitude and longitude values have not been encoded it calls the correct geocoder function, and stores the returned lat / long values in the database.

I have 9k entries in my database, so I can only encode 2k per day due to the limit on the google maps api. But for folks used to encoding entries during creating using geocoded_by in their models, this will work in controllers.