familysearch gem

Installation

You can install it from the commandline.

gem install familysearch

Or add it to a Gemfile for use with Bundler

gem "familysearch", "~> 0.4.0 "

Basic Usage

Here's how to use it

require 'rubygems'
require 'familysearch'

# Instantiate a Client object
client = FamilySearch::Client.new :environment => :sandbox, :key => 'your-dev-key-here'

# For testing, you can use basic auth to get a session, 
# Don't do this in your production web app. Use OAuth 2.0
client.basic_auth! 'your-username', 'your-password'

# the client object has a get, post, put, delete, and head method
response = client.get(client.discovery['links']['current-user-person']['href'])
response.status #=> 200

  # The response body contains a FamilySearch::Gedcomx::FamilySearch object.
# This is technically a Hash, so you could do the following
response.body['persons'][0]['display']['name']

# The FamilySearch::Gedcomx::FamilySearch object also provides convenience methods
# and the hash elements have method accessors
person = response.body.persons[0]
person.full_name #=> "Marshall P Felch"
person.surname #=> "Felch"
person.birth # => a FamilySearch::Gedcomx::Fact object

Discovery Resource

The FamilySearch Platform is RESTful and conforms to HATEOAS principles. This means that you can discover addressable resources in the hypermedia that is returned by the platform. As a starting point, a Discovery Resource is offered up that lists resources that you can programatically begin to explore.

The Discovery Resource is intended to be utilized heavily by this gem. One of the benefits of this is that if FamilySearch needs to change a URI for any resource, your application should continue to work because the URI will be updated in the discovery resource. URIs are not constructed by hard-coding paths within the gem. They are constructed by utilizing templates exposed via the Discovery Resource.

URL Templates

The familysearch gem makes use of the templates exposed on the Discovery Resource. For example, the discovery resource exposes a person-template that looks like this:

"person-template" : {
  "template" : "https://sandbox.familysearch.org/platform/tree/persons/{pid}{?access_token}",
  "type" : "application/json,application/x-fs-v1+json,application/x-fs-v1+xml,application/x-gedcomx-v1+json,application/x-gedcomx-v1+xml,application/xml,text/html",
  "accept" : "application/x-fs-v1+json,application/x-fs-v1+xml,application/x-gedcomx-v1+json,application/x-gedcomx-v1+xml",
  "allow" : "HEAD,GET,POST,DELETE,GET,POST",
  "title" : "Person"
}

To utilize this template, you can do the following from your client object.

response = client.template('person-template').get :pid => 'KWQS-BBQ'

You can also use 'person', or :person instead of 'person-template'. The client will still find the appropriate template.

The above code is equivalent to the following:

response = client.get 'https://sandbox.familysearch.org/platform/tree/persons/KWQX-52J'

FamilySearch::Gedcomx

A separate familysearch-gedcomx gem is pulled in as a dependency for the familysearch gem. This provides a Ruby object structure that matches the application/x-fs-v1+json hypermedia type. It also provides convenience methods and graph (pedigree) traversal functionality.

For more information visit the familysearch-gedcomx homepage.

Faraday

This gem depends upon the wonderful faraday gem for handling HTTP calls. One of the advantages of this is that you could possibly swap out underlying http libraries. Currently, it utilizes the Net::HTTP library, but in the future it could potentially support other libraries such as EventMachine's asynchronous http library.

MultiJson

This gem makes use of the awesome multi_json gem. This allows you to utilize faster json libraries if desired, such as oj or yajil. If you have requireed either of these libraries prior to requiring the familysearch gem, then it will make use of the faster JSON parsing libraries.

Future

Next on the roadmap:

Support post, put, delete, head, etc. from the FamilySearch::URLTemplate objec. (currently only supports get)
Better Faraday configuration options for the client.
Testing of more endpoints (search, match, etc.)
JSON serialization for put, post, etc.
More documentation examples.

Bugs and Feature Requests

Please file bug reports and enhancement requests on the issue tracker.