PostgisAdapter¶ ↑

A plugin for ActiveRecord which manages the PostGIS geometric columns in a transparent way (that is like the other base data type columns). It also provides a way to manage these columns in migrations.

This fork adds handy methods to make geometrical calculations on postgis. Based on georuby.rubyforge.org Spatial Adapter

RDocs - docs.github.com/nofxx/postgis_adapter Postgis Online reference - postgis.refractions.net Postgis Manual - postgis.refractions.net/documentation/manual-svn

If you are using Spatial Adapter, *remove it first*.

gem install postgis_adapter

• georuby gem

• postgres 8.3+

• postgis 1.3+

Add dependency to Gemfile:

gem "postgis_adapter"

Or, to use latest from repository:

gem "postgis_adapter", :git => 'git://github.com/nofxx/postgis_adapter.git'

gem install postgis_adapter -v 0.7.8

Geometric columns in your ActiveRecord models now appear just like any other column of other basic data types. They can also be dumped in ruby schema mode and loaded in migrations the same way as columns of basic types.

Simple rails app to demonstrate, check it out:

github.com/nofxx/postgis_example

class TablePoint < ActiveRecord::Base
end

That was easy! As you see, there is no need to declare a column as geometric. The plugin will get this information by itself.

Here is an example of PostGIS row creation and access, using the model and the table defined above :

pt = TablePoint.new(:data => "Hello!",:geom => Point.from_x_y(1,2))
pt.save
pt = TablePoint.first
puts pt.geom.x
=> 1

Here are this fork additions. To use it:

acts_as_geom [column_name] => [geom_type]

Examples:

class POI < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_geom :geom => :point
end

class Street < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_geom :line => :line_string
end

...

@place  =   Poi.new(    :geom  =>  Point.from_x_y(10,20)    )
@park   =   Park.new(   :area  =>  **Polygon**     )
@street =   Street.new( :line  => **LineString**   )

@place.inside?(@park)
=> true

@place.in_bounds?(@park, 0.5) # margin
=> false

@place.outside?(@park)
@street.crosses?(@park)
@area.contains?(@place)
...

@park.area
=> 1345

@park.contains?(@point)
=> true

@park.overlaps?(@other_park)
=> false

Supports transform (useful to transform SRID to UTM for area in Km^2)

@park.area(SRID)
=> Area with new SRID

@street_east.intersects?(@street_west)
=> false

@street_central.length
=> 4508.53636

@street.length_spheroid
=> 4.40853636

City.close_to(@point)
=> [Array of cities in order by distance...

Street.close_to(@point)
=> [Array streets in order by distance...

Country.contain(@point)
=> The Conutry that contains the point

Area.contains(@point)
=> [Array of areas contains the point...

@area.strictly_left_of? @point

@area.overlaps_or_above? @street

...

completely_contained_by?
completely_contains?
overlaps_or_above?
overlaps_or_below?
overlaps_or_left_of?
overlaps_or_right_of?
strictly_above?
strictly_below?
strictly_left_of?
strictly_right_of?
interacts_with?
binary_equal?
same_as?

Or use a (almost) PostGIS like notation:

@area.bbox "<<", @point

@area.bbox "|>>", @point

@area.bbox "@",  @park

*To be fixed:*

This only supports one geom column per model. Still looking for the best way to implement a multi geom.

nofxx.lighthouseapp.com/projects/20712/tickets/3-multiple-geoms-in-model

find_by_column has been redefined when column is of a geometric type. Instead of using the Rails default ‘=’ operator, for which I can’t see a definition for MySql spatial datatypes and which performs a bounding box equality test in PostGIS, it uses a bounding box intersection: && in PostGIS and MBRIntersects in MySQL, which can both make use of a spatial index if one is present to speed up the queries. You could use this query, for example, if you need to display data from the database: You would want only the geometries which are in the screen rectangle and you could use a bounding box query for that. Since this is a common case, it is the default. You have 2 ways to use the find_by_geom_column: Either by passing a geometric object directly, or passing an array with the 2 opposite corners of a bounding box (with 2 or 3 coordinates depending of the dimension of the data).

      Park.find_by_geom(LineString.from_coordinates([[1.4,5.6],[2.7,8.9],[1.6,5.6]]))

or

      Park.find_by_geom([[3,5.6],[19.98,5.9]])

In PostGIS, since you can only use operations with geometries with the same SRID, you can add a third element representing the SRID of the bounding box to the array. It is by default set to -1:

Park.find_by_geom([[3,5.6],[19.98,5.9],123])

Here is an example of code for the creation of a table with a geometric column in PostGIS, along with the addition of a spatial index on the column :

ActiveRecord::Schema.define do
  create_table :places do |t|
    t.string   :name
    t.point    :geom, :srid => 4326, :with_z => true, :null => false

    t.timestamps
  end

  add_index :places, :geom, :spatial => true
end

Types:

point
polygon
line_string
multi_point
multi_polygon
multi_line_string
geometry
geometry_collection

Optional, this will create postgis enabled database automatically for you.

Helpers to create postgis template database. At time of writing, postgis.sql and spatial_ref_sys.sql are used.

Find where your OS put those sql files and:

rake postgis:template path/to/sqls/folder

Place the following scripts in a folder named ‘spatial’ under the ‘db’ folder; For example:

RAILS_ROOT/db/spatial/lwpostgis.sql
RAILS_ROOT/db/spatial/spatial_ref_sys

These will be used when creating the Test database when running the Rake Test tasks. These scripts should have been installed when the PostGIS libraries were installed. Online reference: postgis.refractions.net/

If you use fixtures for your unit tests, at some point, you will want to input a geometry. You could transform your geometries to a form suitable for YAML yourself everytime but the spatial adapter provides a method to do it for you: to_yaml. It works for both MySQL and PostGIS (although the string returned is different for each database). You would use it like this, if the geometric column is a point:

fixture:
      id: 1
      data: HELLO
      geom: <%= Point.from_x_y(123.5,321.9).to_yaml %>

If you are using annotate_models, check out this fork which adds geometrical annotations for PostgisAdapter and SpatialAdapter:

github.com/nofxx/annotate_models

Ruby geometric datatypes are currently made available only through the GeoRuby library (georuby.rubyforge.org): This is where the Point.from_x_y in the example above comes from. It is a goal of a future release of the Spatial Adapter to support additional geometric datatype libraries, such as Ruby/GEOS, as long as they can support reading and writing of EWKB.

• Since ActiveRecord seems to keep only the string values directly

returned from the database, it translates from these to the correct types everytime an attribute is read, which is probably ok for simple types, but might be less than efficient for geometries, since the EWKB string has to be parsed everytime. Also it means you cannot modify the geometry object returned from an attribute directly :

place = Place.first
place.the_geom.y=123456.7

• Since the translation to a geometry is performed everytime the_geom

is read, the change to y will not be saved! You would have to do something like this :

place = Place.first
the_geom = place.the_geom
the_geom.y=123456.7
place.the_geom = the_geom

Marcos Piccinini (nofxx) Ying Tsen Hong (tsenying) Simon Tokumine (tokumine) Fernando Blat (ferblape) Shoaib Burq (sabman)

(in order of appearance)

Spatial Adapter for Rails is released under the MIT license. Postgis Adapter is released under the MIT license.

Tested using activerecord 3+ / postgresql 8.5+ / postgis 1.5+ / linux / osx

Any questions, enhancement proposals, bug notifications or corrections:

github.com/nofxx/postgis_adapter/issues

georuby.rubyforge.org guilhem.vellut+georuby@gmail.com.