MlaActiveDutyStatus

Tested on ruby 2.3.0 and jruby 1.7.

The Military Lending Act requires lenders in certain situations to check the active duty status of the loan applicant. This gem uses Mechanize to screenscrape the MLA website providing the applicant details and returns a coded response for the active duty status and the MLA PDF certificate.

MLA website: https://mla.dmdc.osd.mil

Please note the MLA may change their site at any time, rendering this gem useless. Usage is at your own risk.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'mla_active_duty_status'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install mla_active_duty_status

This gem can be run from the console with rake console.

The MLA requires the following details:

• last_name (required)
• first_name (optional)
• middle_name (optional)
• ssn (required)
• dob (required)

Create an applicant object:

mla = MlaActiveDutyStatus::Applicant.new('Citizen', 'John', 'Q', '614223456',  '1950-01-25')

Check that the applicant details meet requirements:

mla.valid?

This returns true or false and then you can view any validation errors:

mla.errors
=> ["last_name must be present", "date_of_birth must be within 100 years"]

Get the active duty status of the applicant:

mla.active_duty_status

This returns an array of 2 values:

• status:

  0 = neither applicant nor spouse are active duty

  1 = applicant or spouse appears active duty

  7 = MLA service timeout or error

  9 = invalid or missing required fields

• pdf - a binary string of the Certificate

Response times are typically 1.0 - 3.0 seconds. This gem does not maintain a persistent connection across Rails' requests because Mechanize is not threadsafe. A future version will probably drop Mechanize for a pure HTTP::Net::Persistent implementation.

Currently tested against MRI 2.3.0 but anything > 1.9.2 should work.

Known issue with jruby but the gem monkeypatches a fix until the issue is available in Mechanize.

The MLA site is part of the DoD and uses site certificates that you might not ordinarily have installed.

The MLA has instructions for installing certificates, but you will most likely need to download the cert file to your production server and point to it like this:

MlaActiveDutyStatus.configuration.ca_path = '/path/to/my/ca_cert.crt'

By default, this gem will use the java keystore on jruby.

It is highly recommended that you do NOT disable certificate verification, but if you need to debug a problem then set the configuration like this:

MlaActiveDutyStatus.configuration.ssl_verify = false

Set value for configuration:

MlaActiveDutyStatus.configuration.logging = true

• max_years_for_age_check - Ages older than this will be flagged as invalid.

• logging - if true or in Rails development environment will log to a local file called mechlog.log

Defaults:

@max_years_for_age_check = 100
@mla_host = 'mla.dmdc.osd.mil'
@mla_path = '/mla/single_record.xhtml'
@ssl_verify = true
@ca_path = nil
@logging = false
@open_timeout = 10
@read_timeout = 10

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/jimjames99/mla_active_duty_status. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.