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One thing’s for sure: consuming web services in Rails is not very well documented. There are a few ways of going about it, but the easiest way uses REST.

Problem: provide a way to look up a zip code to find a city. With the returned city, search the local database for a match. Then output accordingly.

Solution: Ruby on Rails with the REXML library.

Forget SOAP and XML-RPC, get REST’ed! I will show you how I went about pulling a city by zip code, then using the returned city in a query on my local database.

• Get a Yahoo! Developer Application ID.
• Open up the Yahoo! Geocoding API docs for reference.
• Use the following code in your

  controller.rb

  file.

# welcome_controller.rb
def city
 appid = "myYahooDeveloperAppID"
 url = "http://api.local.yahoo.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=#{appid}&location=90210"
 @results = REXML::Document.new(Net::HTTP.get(URI(url)))
end

# views/welcome/city.rhtml
@results.root.each_element { |city| "#{city[3].text}" }

There you go. Can you believe it’s that easy?

Labels: programming, ruby on rails, yui

// posted by Wes Rogers @ 15:28 0 Comments Links to this post