Can somebody recommend a good gem for contact handling? [closed]

Question

I want to store person / company contacts with addresses and relations. Addresses can have multiple lines for streets, phonenumbers and emails. Would be also nice to have some kind of export feature.

Contacthandling seems like a common task, so i want to know how others are doing this job.

I had a look at the following gems and applications:

• https://github.com/pluginaweek/has_addresses

  demonstrates a reference implementation for handling countries, regions, and addresses

• https://github.com/midas/addressable_record

  Encapsulates the composed of pattern for addresses into any easy to use library

• https://github.com/huerlisi/has_vcards

  Rails plugin providing VCard like contact and address models and helpers

• https://github.com/fraser/vpim-rails

  vPim for rails provides calendaring, scheduling, and contact support for Ruby through the standard iCalendar and vCard data formats for "personal information" exchange

• https://github.com/jwood/addressbook

  An address book web application (Rails) that stores phone numbers, addresses, and prints mailing labels

Are you using one of the mentioned gems, can you recommend other gems or do you implement this on your own (why and how)?

Liveried

Related question on howto build from scratch: #6140715 – Liveried

Can i give more information to get interest on this question or is the question to general? – Liveried

Sure - What is it about each of the gems or applications you list above that doesn't meet your needs? Or are you looking for folks to talk about their experience with the ones you list? – Flirtatious

Answer 1

Address handling is actually a very complex subject. That is the reason there are so many different implementations. Take a look at Martin Fowlers Party, Role Object and Accountability patterns. You might also run into i18n problems, and might want to do decent normalization (with street, zip, city, state, country objects, and structure depending on the country). Then these are all temporal relationships, and your application demands determine how much history to register.

Headstream

Thanks for your answer. I had a look into the design patterns and it seems complex. What do you mean by temporal relationships? – Liveried

A person has a phone number actually means: a person uses a phone number from a point in time to another point in time. You might even have to register at which point in time this knowledge was added. See Analysis patterns – Headstream

Answer 2

vPim appears to be what you need. It has Rails support.

Deplorable

Are there examples on howto use this with activerecord? – Liveried

@Liveried According to a quick Google search for "vPim activerecord" and "vPim activerecord example", there seem to be many. However, I do not know which of these will be useful to you, as I'm not an expert in this space. This may be a good basis for other questions here on SO. :) – Deplorable

Answer 3

Roll Your Own

I would build it out yourself and have a look at these Gems for their respective purposes:

• Carmen (and the companion Rails gem Carmen-Rails)
• Snail

Carmen does a great job of prepopulating Country, State/Province, Region fields and Snail does a good job of storing and displaying the other pieces of an address.

Amazing there isn't a complete solution out there but addresses are a finicky subject.

Cheers,

JP

Tensimeter