Google Maps for Rails (gmaps4rails)¶ ↑

Gmaps4rails is developped to simply create a Google Map:

• directly from your model,

• from your own json

It’s based on Ruby on Rails 3 Engines and uses Google Maps API V3.

See (somewhat outdated) screencasts here: www.youtube.com/user/TheApneadiving

When Gmaps4rails finally means Global Maps for Rails¶ ↑

I’ve added support for other map providers:

• openlayers

• mapquest

• bing

See: github.com/apneadiving/Google-Maps-for-Rails/wiki/Map-Apis

Any help would be appreciated to complete this work.

Requirements¶ ↑

• gem ‘gmaps4rails’ (in your gemfile, then bundle)

• <%= yield :head %> (in your header)

• <%= yield :scripts %> (in your footer)

To make Rails serve the assets (javascripts, stylesheets and marker images) you have several options, depending on your configuration and Rails version:

• if you are using Rails 3.1 and have asset pipeline enabled (‘config.assets.enabled = true’ in config/application.rb), include the appropriate manifest:

  • //= require gmaps4rails/bing.js

  • //= require gmaps4rails/googlemaps.js

  • //= require gmaps4rails/mapquest.js

  • //= require gmaps4rails/openlayers.js

  • //= require gmaps4rails/all_apis.js

  You even don’t need the ‘yield :head` if you include `require gmaps4rails` in your CSS manifest.

• if you are using Rails 3.0: see para below to be sure everything will work in production.

• finally you can just copy assets to your application’s public/stylesheets, public/javascripts/gmaps4rails and public/images. It’s recommended to do this in production so that you can let your webserver serve them rather than go through Rails each time they are requested. There’s a generator to help you with that:

  rails generate gmaps4rails:install
  

  This will copy the coffeescript files if you’re running Rails 3.1 or the js files for Rails 3.0.x

Basic configuration¶ ↑

In your model, add:

acts_as_gmappable

def gmaps4rails_address
  #describe how to retrieve the address from your model, if you use directly a db column, you can dry your code, see wiki
  "#{self.street}, #{self.city}, #{self.country}" 
end

Create a migration and add the following fields to your table (here users):

add_column :users, :latitude, :float #you can change the name, see wiki
add_column :users, :longitude, :float #you can change the name, see wiki
add_column :users, :gmaps, :boolean #not mandatory, see wiki

How to?¶ ↑

QuickStart!¶ ↑

In your controller:

@json = User.all.to_gmaps4rails

In your view:

<%= gmaps4rails(@json) %>

Done!

Options¶ ↑

• Markers with Info window, Custom Picture, RichMarkers (make your own markers with custom html)

• Automatic sidebar with list of markers

• Circles, Polylines, Polygons

• Geocode directly your address and retrieve coordinates.

• Wrapper for ‘Direction’, giving instructions to go from point A to point B

• Auto-adjust the map to your markers

• Refresh your map on the fly with Javascript (and Ajax)

• KML support

• Easy multimap

• More details in the Wiki

Todo?¶ ↑

Feel free ton contact us, you have your say.

Copyright¶ ↑

MIT license.

Authors: Benjamin Roth, David Ruyer

Contributors: Mircea Pricop, Kamil Śliwak, Alex Vorobiev