Geocoding addresses with the Geocodable behavior

Since the introduction of Google Maps and other location services, a broad set of possibilities are open to web applications, allowing geographical information to be used for building services.

This recipe shows how to use the Geocode plugin to add location information to our own Address model, allowing us to search address records by proximity.

Note

The Geocode plugin is another open source project I released. More information about it can be obtained at http://github.com/mariano/geocode.

Getting ready

To go through this recipe we need a sample table to work with. Create a table named addresses, using the following SQL statement:

CREATE TABLE `addresses`(
`id` INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL,
`address_1` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
`city` VARCHAR(255) default NULL,
`state` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
`zip` VARCHAR(10) default NULL,
`latitude` FLOAT(10,7) NOT NULL,
`longitude` FLOAT(10,7) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY(`id`)
);

We proceed now to create the...