Question

My web app allows users to record their geolocation data. I need to somehow get that geolocation data into a file so I can put it in s3 storage. I have no idea how to go about this, but the controller already has file uploads to s3 set up using paperclip.

Is there some way to generate a file with javascript and then attach that file when the user clicks save? The other option I was thinking is that I could add a bunch of strings to the body using jQuery .data() method, but then I don’t know how to attach a string as a file in my rails 3 form.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

maybe you should try out Amazon’s simple db instead of s3 for this? It would be more appropriate than creating files to store data in s3.

Amazon recently released a ruby sdk for their web services, SDB included:
https://github.com/amazonwebservices/aws-sdk-for-ruby

Edit: Or better yet, forget using SDB directly. I had forgotten that that SDK includes an implementation of ActiveModel called AWS::Record. Should make this trivial.

I’m assuming you’re on Heroku or something and don’t have a method of data persistence?

edit: looking quickly at paperclip’s assign method, there’s a chance this would work.

yourmodel.your_paperclip_attachment = StringIO.new(params[:your_posted_geolocation_data])

Paperclip appears to handle creating a tempfile from the stream.