Announcing PostgresExt-PostGIS

gis

Partner & Developer

Dan McClain

Today I released the first version of postgres_ext-postgis, which extends ActiveRecord to support PostGIS data types and some querying. This is definitely a beta release, but ready to the point where people can play around with it.

Migrations

With postgres_ext-postgis, you can easily add geometry columns:

create_table :districts do |t|
  t.geometry :district_boundries
end

If you’d like to include your projection or geometry type, just include them as options to your column:

create_table :districts do |t|
  t.geometry :district_boundries, spatial_type: :multipolygon, srid: 4326
end

Type Casting

Your geometry columns will be typecasted into RGeo objects. You can set your attributes with RGeo objects or EWKT/EWKB strings. EWKT/EWKB strings will be converted to RGeo objects:

user.location = 'SRID=4623;POINT(1 1)'

Querying

For now, the only added querying method for ActiveRecord is contains:

District.where.contains(district_boundries: user.location)

The above query will utilize PostGIS’s ST_CONTAINS to see if the district_boundries column contains the user.location. I plan to add a convience method to convert EWKT strings to RGeo object, something like PostgreExt.geom('SRID=4623;POINT(1 1)'), to make generating queries from, say, a mobile user’s current location a bit easier.

As I get feedback and use postgres_ext-postgis, more features will get added. Stay tuned!

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