How can I retrieve the Geolocation from an IP address in Grails? - spring

Question

I want to retrieve the geolocation from an IP-address in a Grails app.
I tried hostip and geoip both raise exceptions and did not work for me. Is there any other way to get the geolocation?
When I use geoip I have:
config.groovy:
geoip.data.resource= "/WEB-INF/GeoLiteCity.dat"
geoip.data.cache="GEOIP_STANDARD"
In my controller:
GeoIpService geoIpService
index() {
def location = geoIpService.getLocation("85.176.52.75")
render location.countryName + " " + location.city
}
The exception is:
| Error 2013-07-26 14:04:22,236 [http-bio-8090-exec-1] ERROR
errors.GrailsExceptionResolver - NullPointerException occurred when processing request: [GET] /test/home/index
Stacktrace follows:
Message: null
Line | Method
->> 199 | <init> in java.util.StringTokenizer
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
| 221 | <init> in ''
| 624 | getLocationwithdnsservice in com.maxmind.geoip.LookupService
| 593 | getLocation in ''
| 42 | getLocation . . . . . . . in org.grails.geoip.service.GeoIpService
| 12 | index in test.HomeController
| 195 | doFilter . . . . . . . . in
grails.plugin.cache.web.filter.PageFragmentCachingFilter
| 63 | doFilter in grails.plugin.cache.web.filter.AbstractFilter
| 1145 | runWorker . . . . . . . . in java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor
| 615 | run in java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker
^ 722 | run . . . . . . . . . . . in java.lang.Thread

Answer 1

After downloading your sample grails app from github, and after debugging it for a while, I found out what the problem is. Well, there are 2 problems really:
Your configuration for the geoip plugin is incorrect
The documentation for the geoip plugin makes it look like the configuration you have is correct, when it is not.
If you take a look at the documentation for the plugin: http://grails.org/plugin/geoip you will see that it talks about the configuration for the geoip.data.cache as follows:
geoip.data.cache - There are 4 possible values for this:
0 - GEOIP_STANDARD
1 - GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE
2 - GEOIP_CHECK_CACHE
4 - GEOIP_INDEX_CACHE
So what it is actually looking for is the integer values, not the strings beside them. For example, 0 is used for GEOIP_STANDARD, so you configure it with:
geoip.data.cache=0
When I changed the configuration of your sample app to the above, I no longer get the exceptions.