README

###About this App

This application allows users to easily determine the street sweeping schedule for any location in Chicago.

###Dependencies

The application runs on Rails and depends on many of the standard gems that come with a new Rails app. In addition, Don't Park There Chicago depends on:

• PostGIS

  • PostGIS extends Postgres so that it can include geospatial data that can then be queried. It must be installed before the database can be used.
    • For OSX users, brew install postgis.
    • For Linux users, see this link for directions to install PostGIS.
  • The activerecord-postgis-adapter is included in the Gemfile and provides ActiveRecord query support for PostGIS. As long as the application has been bundled, the gem should work.

• Devise

These dependencies require ActiveRecord 4.0+ and Ruby 1.9.3+. PostGIS must be version 2.0+

###How to setup the database Note: The procedure below will not work unless PostGIS is installed. See above for instructions on installing PostGIS.

1. rake db:create
2. rake db:migrate
3. rake db:after_migrate This task populates the regions table in the database with the map data.

To verify that all this worked, open the Rails console and check that there are 888 regions (Region.all.count) and also that Region.first doesn't throw an error message.

###Running the tests

1. rake db:test:prepare
2. rake db:test_after_prepare
3. rspec spec

###Git Work-flow:

To start working on the app:

git clone repo
git pull origin master
git checkout -b "your_branch_name"

To submit a pull request:

git checkout "your_branch_name"
git add your changes
git commit your changes
git checkout master
git pull/fetch origin master
git checkout "your_branch_name"
git merge master (if MERGE CONFLICTS exist, resolve them)
git add and commit any changes
git push origin "your_branch_name"

Lastly, submit a pull request on Github

Where does the data come from?

The data for this app is available from the city of Chicago through Socrata. It can be seen in visual form here. We accessed the data in kml form which can be had here.

To add this kml data into our database (see above for info on setting up the database) we needed to convert the data into SQL commands. As a result we wrote a simple kml parser (see db/fixtures/parsetastic2000.rb in this repository) to do this. Simply type ruby parsetastic2000.rb in your console while in the same directory as both the parsing file and the kml file and it will produce the sql file. The parser is not perfect, so you will likely need to do some cleanup. First, find and replace all 'NULL' with NULL (get rid of those quotes). Then, search for any <li> tags in the data and delete the markup. There will likely be around 20 to delete due to imperfections in the data and imperfections in the parsing. Once that is done you will have a sql file that is ready to be imported into a PostGis database.