# Doing a radius/location search **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [April 16, 2008, 9:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/doing-a-radius-location-search/134991 "2008-04-16T21:44:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![wemagor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/8edcca/32.png) [@wemagor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wemagor)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2008, 9:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/doing-a-radius-location-search/134991/1 "2008-04-16T21:44:37Z")
The application I’m developing allows people to create events in their local area; as part of this feature I want to display a list of, say, the five most recent events within 30 miles of a person’s location. I have a User model and a Profiles model which contains the user’s location (city, state, zip code) among other non-related personal information. So what I would like to do is be able to do is to get a list of upcoming events relative to that person’s location, and display it on their “control panel” when they log in to the site. Also, at some point in the future I want to integrate with Google Maps to display a map of the Event’s location on a particular event’s detail page (i.e. “show” action in the controller); this isn’t required for the Beta version of the site, but it’s something to consider since it will be a feature later. I’ve been looking at the Google Maps API but I’m not sure if it would let me do what I _really_ need, which is to query for all zip codes within 30 miles of a given zip code, so I can display the events to users who live within that radius and hopefully get them to attend. I have the book “RailsSpace”, and it implements something similar to what I want with a database, but if I go this route will it prevent me from using Google Maps at a later date? I haven’t really looked yet to see if there are any plugins that can help me out with this - I want to get a handle on the concepts I need, and then work on the implementation. To summarize, what I want to be able to do is: - Display a list of the five most recent events within 30 miles of a user’s location on their profile page - Send an email to all users within 30 miles of an event upon creation, notifying them that a new event has been scheduled in their area (this one I can probably figure out myself once I have the location part done) - Enable a user to search for upcoming events within a specified radius of a zip code - At some point in the future, integrate with Google Maps to display a map of the event in question; presumably this would be based on the event’s zip code Anyone have any pointers on how to accomplish this? My main point of concern is I’m not sure if I should use the approach of the RailsSpace book, which as I recall is to set up a database containing the location data, and do some funky math to get the radius, or if there’s some third-party API available that I could mash-up with and leverage, especially if it would make future integration easier. Any help would be appreciated. – Wayne M. removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid ---
**Author:** ![wemagor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/8edcca/32.png) [@wemagor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wemagor)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2008, 10:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/doing-a-radius-location-search/134991/2 "2008-04-16T22:24:44Z")
Check out the Geokit plugin (for distance finders) and the YM4R-GM plugin for Google map display. Harry ---
**Author:** ![wemagor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/8edcca/32.png) [@wemagor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wemagor)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 2:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/doing-a-radius-location-search/134991/3 "2008-04-17T02:10:35Z")
I’ve also used the zip code plugin at this location: [http://zipcodesearch.rubyforge.org/](http://zipcodesearch.rubyforge.org/) with good results. ---
**Author:** ![wemagor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/8edcca/32.png) [@wemagor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wemagor)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2008, 12:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/doing-a-radius-location-search/134991/4 "2008-04-18T00:58:36Z")
> I’ve also used the zip code plugin at this location:[http://zipcodesearch.rubyforge.org/](http://zipcodesearch.rubyforge.org/) > with good results. The acts\_as\_locateable plugin is based on zipcodesearch with the same features plus some improvements. [http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/actsaslocateable](http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/actsaslocateable) [http://www.baconbear.com/articles/2006/12/29/actsaslocateable-released](http://www.baconbear.com/articles/2006/12/29/actsaslocateable-released) ---
**Author:** ![wemagor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/8edcca/32.png) [@wemagor](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/wemagor)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 5:33am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/doing-a-radius-location-search/134991/5 "2008-04-17T05:33:31Z")
I second Harry’s suggestion for Geokit. It’s super easy and very powerful. Let’s you do a simple query like: Event.find(:all, :origin=\> @user.address, :within=\>30, :limit =\> 5, :order =\> ‘distance asc’) That would find the 5 events within 30 miles ordered by closest to the user’s address, which could be any “geolocatable representation”… i.e. anything you’d type in at [maps.google.com](http://maps.google.com) and get a valid response. [http://geokit.rubyforge.org/](http://geokit.rubyforge.org/) Oh, and YM4R-GM is good for getting started, but if you start to get fancy with Google Maps, you may find, as I did, that it’s best to just build it directly with Javascript using the Google Maps API. It seemed weird to me to be building view logic within the controller, so I ended up ditching YM4R and doing the javascript directly via the view and helpers. Good luck! -Danimal