---
title: Autocomplete address with Google Places and Stimulus - clearbnb - Part 4
slug: autocomplete-address-with-google-places-and-stimulus-clearbnb-part-4
published_at: 2021-10-04 14:00:31 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:52 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode, we'll work more on the Listing create form by adding support for address autocomplete with the Google Places API. We'll talk about some stimulus.js basics and wire up a stimulus controller to handle the place completed event.   Inspiration for the loaded event from Chris Oliver's episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odziYrbiphA   stimulus-rails https://github.com/hotwired/stimulus-rails   Places autocomplete docs https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/places-autocomplete-addressform#maps_places_autocomplete_addressform-javascript #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, ruby on rails tutorial, stimulus js, address autocomplete, rails address autocomplete, google address autocomplete, google places API]
views: 3743
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/autocomplete-address-with-google-places-and-stimulus-clearbnb-part-4
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj15TCNtxKE
youtube_id: Zj15TCNtxKE
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zj15TCNtxKE
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Zj15TCNtxKE/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Autocomplete address with Google Places and Stimulus - clearbnb - Part 4

*Published: October 04, 2021*
*Views: 3743*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj15TCNtxKE)

[![Autocomplete address with Google Places and Stimulus - clearbnb - Part 4](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Zj15TCNtxKE/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj15TCNtxKE)

## Description

In this episode, we'll work more on the Listing create form by adding support for address autocomplete with the Google Places API. We'll talk about some stimulus.js basics and wire up a stimulus controller to handle the place completed event. 

Inspiration for the loaded event from Chris Oliver's episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odziYrbiphA 

stimulus-rails https://github.com/hotwired/stimulus-rails 

Places autocomplete docs https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/places-autocomplete-addressform#maps_places_autocomplete_addressform-javascript
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

what's up welcome back you're watching part four in a series where we're building out a short-term vacation rental marketplace and in the very first episode that we put out the intro we got some really good feedback and ideas about different things that we could add and so in the comments we saw asks for adding geolocation to your listings for adding mapping system being able to see on a map where all the listings are we also had ideas around adding reviews so that a guest could review a host and a host could review a guest so we'll talk about adding all of that stuff but what i wanted to do today and in this episode is we'll go through adding place autocomplete so we're going to use the google maps api here i've pulled up the documentation for the autocomplete place thing where you can sort of just type in an address and using the google maps api it'll auto-complete the address so that you have a real address but what's beautiful about this is you also get the geometry so you're also gonna get the latitude and longitude for where that property is listed so this is gonna this is gonna sort of act as uh our geolocation and we're gonna continue this is sort of part also of creating the listing so we're just creating the address for the listing here okay so let's dive in and talk about how we might implement this so in order to use this google maps javascript tool on the client we need to write a little bit of javascript and what we could do is just write some inline javascript that did a bunch of this stuff right so we're going to you know create an autocomplete field and then we'll use document.queryselector to just update a bunch of content on the page but what i think the more railsy thing to do in this case in particular is to add some stimulus js so stimulus is a really thin javascript library that adds some really basic stuff to the front end that we can use when we want to add a little bit of javascript interactivity but we don't necessarily need a full like single page rendered app so what i want to do is let's uh let's go through and sort of modify this demo or like this example and we'll use it with stimulus so maybe first step is to actually get started by installing stimulus rails so you can say bundle add stimulus rails and this will add the stimulus rails gem to our gem file and it will also bundle install i'm not using import map or i think there's a couple other tools for setting up stimulus i think you can say rails g stimulus colon install and this should set up some basic stuff for getting stimulus installed nope i got that wrong so stimulus stimulus rails let's see here so oh rails stimulus install it's not a generator so it's rails stimulus install there's no g okay so this created a directory for us called controllers it also created an index an application and a hello controller so let's jump in and take a look at what those give us so under app javascript now we have controllers and there's an apple inside of application this is kind of doing this setup i think for the application in general then our hello controller is just an example controller we're actually just going to delete that and then we have this index which is registering the hello controller so we're going to actually create a brand new controller here and let's call it address controller.js and in here we'll import controller uh from um can i import it directly from yeah okay so hotwired from hot wired uh stimulus and then we're going to say export default class extends controller and inside of here is where we're actually going to define our our controller and now a stimulus controller is a javascript object that's going to attach to some dom element and basically just listen for events that are firing on the dom element and then allows you to sort of add a little bit of javascript interactivity to some some object in the controller so for now let's just say connect so connect there's a couple different like life cycle methods there's connect initialization disconnect for now we'll just say console.log address address controller is connected and we'll take a look and try to like see when that happens um all right so the next step that we need to do when we're installing stimulus if we don't have import map and some other things is in our pack for application we need to actually import controllers here so at this point we should have an address controller that when it's mounted or when it's connected to a dom element we should see this log statement happen um so if we pull up uh localhost 3000 okay it's actually not even running so let's start rails server and then we're also going to start our webpack dev server in two separate tabs i know i'm continuing to using webpack the industry hasn't necessarily settled on what the best yeah the industry has not settled on what the best um build pack or whatever is going to be for rail seven so i'm kind of holding off to see how how folks land on that um and then there's one other thing that i missed and that is that inside of this index for controllers i'm still importing hello controller instead of address controller it turns out that this file is auto-generated so you actually just copy this you just like kind of copy this command here so i'm going to grab this thing and then run that and we're gonna say reload that and now we see address controller is being pulled in and now that's what's registered and now we see that our webpack dev server is compiling successfully so that's good now if we go back to like um host listing slash new right what i want to do is add a new input field here for address and when you type into that address it should use the google's address autocomplete so what we want to do is let's go to listing new to the listing new page here and let's add a new um a new label and it's going to be for address and inside of here we're going to have an input box and that's going to be of type text the id will be address so that our label selection works and we'll have no value to start off we actually want to turn autocomplete off here so that we're not using the browser's autocompletion that will conflict with like the drop down that's created by the google maps places api thing now when we're using the stimulus controller called address controller what we want to do is we want to mount that onto some dom element now you might have a controller that's associated with your entire form but in this case i want to be able to potentially add autocomplete to other other fields so what i want to do is actually create just a div here and we'll use this div as sort of the container for all of the address stuff that we want to do and the way that we connect the address controller javascript file to this dom element is we say data dash controller so we use these data dash attributes and here we specif we just say address by convention this is the name of the controller so address is the same as this this name of the stimulus controller and by doing just this by just adding data dash controller now when we reload our page make this a little bigger in the console we should see that that address controller was connected and we do we see this log statement here address controller is connected that's because that connect method is fired when the stimulus controller is connected to that dom element so right now if we look at this html we see this div data controller address so now this div and everything inside of it is associated with that address controller um so that's pretty cool all right so what we want to do is eventually inside of this controller we're going to have methods for like init google or something and this is going to be to like set up autocomplete and then we're also going to have a method that fires once like a place is selected place selected and that will like use the values from autocomplete um to actually like do its thing so in order to set all of this up we need to use the google maps api and so we want to add a javascript like a script tag to our page that has our api key set up but i wanted to walk through how you actually set that up in the google cloud platform dashboard so i've got clear bnb this is kind of the project where we're gonna we we've already enabled the oauth settings so that we can log in with google so i'm gonna enable some more apis and services here and i wanna search for all of the like maps like javascript maps apis because we want to enable maps eventually we're going to show maps right now we're not actually showing them but we want to enable maps for clear bnb and we also want to enable the places api so we'll enable that and we also want to enable the geocoding api i think um yep so we've got the geocoding api i don't know the differences between the geo coding api and the geo location api but we'll just add um well i'm going to add them both right now it doesn't yeah i don't think it hurts to add them as long as you're oh location data from cell towers i actually don't need that um but all right so this project is going to have an api key that is associated with the uh with all of these different apis and so we're going to come into our credential setting for the google this google cloud platform platform we're going to say create credentials we want to create an api key i'm going to copy this api key you don't have to copy it or look at it i'm going to roll the key after i record this then the next thing we're going to do is we're going to go into our so i'm going to close that out so i can still roughly see the key here we're going to go into rails credential colon edit i've already got my api keys set up for oauth with google so now i'm going to say maps and drop in my api key there and then close that out so that my api keys are stored in my my credentials the next step is we want to drop that javascript tag on the page so one thing that you might run into and that i ran into when i was playing around with this is that you need to have billing set up and you also want to restrict your api key so once you're actually once you have your app published to a domain you can restrict the api key so that only requests coming from your domain with that api key work so that if someone takes your api key they can't just drop it on their own website and use it so this is this is helpful if you want to like control access to that api key but i'm going to go roll those keys anyways so you don't have to like no need to copy that the next thing is that you also need to have billing set up so you get like 200 or something in free credits which accounts to like 400 000 requests or something like that uh i think for each thousand requests it costs five bucks so it's it's been more than enough to to play around and experiment so um all right so we've got let's say we've got our geolocation api key set up the next thing is we want to drop in this script tag so i'm going to open up application html erb and at the very top of the page here i'm just going to load google maps and instead of placing this api key thing here we want to actually use our our rails.application.credentials.google maps and that should be our maps api key the other thing is that we want to set this this script tag to load as async and defer and we also want to set data uh turbo links something equals false dato turbo data turbo links eval is false because we only want to load this javascript one time as we're turbo linking around we don't want to like switch to different stuff okay so then the other piece of this is that in the query string for this javascript file we want to tell the google maps javascript which javascript function we're going to expose that it can call when it's done loading so we're going to say callback is equal to init map this needs to be a globally available function called an init map or whatever whatever you name your function that's on the window that's what you want to pass in here as the callback and this is kind of funky like the way that this actually works is kind of funky so when the page when the page first loads on the user's browser it's going to download the javascript from google google is going to execute all of its stuff to set things up and then it's going to call your init whatever your callback function is and that's how you know that the google javascript is set up and ready to go so we actually need to go create some sort of global function that's going to be called when the google map thing is loaded so i'm going to go into packs actually and down here i'm just going to say window.init map is equal to some function that's going to be called and we'll say console.log map initialized or something i don't know and then we will go back to our browser and when we refresh the page we're now seeing that the map is initialized so our address controller is connected and the map is initialized what's really cool is um okay so it looks like maybe our key isn't being loaded okay so you got to restart you got to restart the server after you set up the credentials so now our api key is in there and our map is initialized so that's looking awesome what's once the map is initialized like this you should have access to a global variable called google and this is going to be kind of your access into the google maps apis here and so there's a method that we can call or we're going to initialize a new instance of this thing called autocomplete so we're going to say new google maps places autocomplete we're going to pass in an element that we want to mount this onto and then we should just get we should sort sort of just get autocomplete out of the box i think so let's go over to our okay well what's weird is that um we have this init map function that we're calling at the window level right and we can see that the map is being initialized but we don't know about that event and we don't know that google is initialized inside of our addresses controller so we need some way to sort of notify the address controller that this event is firing or that sort of google is ready and we can't really pass and knit google like the instance method from the our address controller as the method that's called in the callback so instead what we want to do is we're going to build a little bit of an interop and this was inspired by chris oliver's go rails episode about using stripe.js with or i'm using uh google maps with stimulus and his idea was to fire an event here so we create an event const event is new event and we're gonna pass in whatever map loaded or something and then we say event dot init event and we're gonna this is where we're like actually name the event that's gonna fire so we can say like map loaded and then we can tell it that the event does bubble true and then it also is cancelable true and in order to broadcast this event globally we're going to say window.dispatch event event i think this is how this works okay cool so then if we if we were to go back to our page here this init or this map loaded event is going to be a new type of event just like click and submit and there's several different event types right that can fire in in our case we're creating a brand new instance of an event called map loaded that's going to actually fire at on the window level and so we using stimulus if we head back over to listing new using stimulus we can actually register an action and listen for this global event that's going to fire on the window and we can register that by saying data action and then we say the event type that's going to fire so if this was going to be a click event then we would say click and then whatever we would handle that click event but because the event type here is map loaded we're gonna say map loaded and that is on the window so we're gonna say the when the map is loaded on the window uh fire the instance method called init google and that instance method is on the address controller it's kind of confusing like this this action query language doesn't make a ton of sense to me but this is kind of how we're doing it so we're listening for the map loaded event to fire on the window and when that happens we are going to call so i think this arrow function means call and the function we're going to call is the init google method on the address controller and since we're inside of the address controller we should be able to call that init google function so let's make sure that in our address controller we have this init google thing we're going to say like console.log google maps is initialized and the address controller knows about it okay so if we come back over here and refresh the page now at the bottom in the console we see the controller's initialized and the google maps is initialized and the address controller knows about it let's also console.log google from here just so that we can see that we are indeed getting like the full google object so this is just a global object that's now available on the window and we happen to have it inside of our init google method and what we want to do here is set up that autocomplete function so so far what we've done is we've set up stimulus we set up a little interop that says we when the google maps javascript is loaded we're going to fire this global event and then we use stimulus.js to wire up that global event and listen for it in our controller and now what we need to do is use that new google object to construct a brand new address map places autocomplete method on on some element um that we want to use so if we go back to listing new right inside of here what we really want to do is we want to use this this input box as the autocomplete element that's like the dom element that we want to pass into that autocomplete thing and so i think what we want to do here is actually give this another type of stimulus thing called data target we're going to say data dash target or address target and we're going to call this input and then back in our controller we need to specify several targets so we're going to say static targets is equal to this list where we're going to give it input as our first target now stimulus is doing a really cool thing here they're just they know that because we called this um this attribute data dash and then the controller name dash target and gave it this name input that it's going to create several different methods and references inside of the controller that we can use to access that dom element that is a sub element of uh of this whole controller so this is this is really neat let's check this out so what we can do now is when we're calling auto complete we're going to say this dot input target so the format here is something like the this dot and then whatever the name of target is and then with a capital t target and there's also like targets and there's also like uh has something with a capital name of target so there's a couple different ways you can access those but this should this should initialize autocomplete on that target so let's see if that changes anything for us out of the box okay so immediately we can see now that the placeholder now the placeholder has changed now it says enter location and if we start typing one two three main street or something right then we can see that is auto-completing so this is exactly what we wanted to happen so we're seeing one two three main street it's auto completing and then when we select it ideally uh recall that we wanna like take all the different components for the address including the latin long and we want to store those in the database with the listing um and so now we want to talk about the next step which is like as you're actually or after you finish typing in here right and you select something we want to do something after that and so what we want to do is actually store reference to this instance of autocomplete we're going to say this dot this auto complete is equal to this thing and um these autocomplete like this instance of this autocomplete thing you can tell it what fields you want you can also do this in another method you can say select fields let's do it this way so we're going to pass in some options object into fields i guess we also just want types i don't want to restrict the component to certain countries because theoretically anyone could stay anywhere or something we haven't actually like figured out if we want to be available in every country but whatever for now we'll just remove that setting and so when we initialize this i think this should work that we will get the address components back we'll get the geometry including latin long and we only want addresses that will give us that'll limit it i think so that we don't end up with like uh i don't know places like parks or something i don't know uh all right and then what we can do is we can say this dot auto complete dot uh we'll fire an event called place changed so we can say that listen to no dot um add listener for place changed and when the place changed event fires we want to call some function so let's actually call this dot place selected and that'll fire off this event or like that that'll call this method on the controller and in order for us to contain or like maintain reference to this we want to call dot bind this just so that we're actually calling um we're calling place selected and we'll continue to have reference to the same controller now inside of place selected this is where we're hoping to do something from that autocomplete and it turns out that we can actually get access to the place by saying like place is equal to this dot auto complete i kind of wonder like i was expecting that when the place changed event fired that would actually be passed as an argument here but it's not the you have to like use the reference of the autocomplete to get the place the method is uh get place and we'll just console.log the place and that should give us like all the stuff that we asked for i think so here we will uh invoking something something add listener is not a function refresh okay add listener i spelled this wrong add add listener okay so now when we say one two three main street or something now you can see that we're logging out the actual place and this gives us the address components so that has like the address number the um the whatever the street name the city the county which we don't actually care about the state and the country and then like the zip code or the postal code the postal code is actually broken into two different components so this gives us like an even more narrow specific postal code super cool but how do we actually get this back to our back end to update or while we're creating a listing well uh the way that i think that makes the most sense to approach this is i'm actually going to just create a bunch of hidden inputs that are inside of this data controller dom element and when the place is selected we'll just update all of the elements with whatever we got back so if we go back to our html here so we're going to have like a ton of elements so we're going to say input type is hidden the um we don't need names or values what we do need is or i'm sorry we do need uh we need name and so the name is going to be what is passed back to the server so listing listing and this is going to be like address line one and the data address target so again this is going to be the way that we use stimulus to target these hidden input elements and we need to use this data dash address target and then specify what is the name for this target here and so for line one we'll call it line one we'll have line two and then we'll have city see okay so these are all just a bunch of hidden inputs we've got the name here that's what's going to be passed to the server we've got the data address targets that's what is going to allow us to create targets back in our controller so up here we can now create like line 1 we can have line 2 city state postal code and country and now several new targets are going to be created for us for these this is line two city state uh postal code country okay so now when the place is selected we want to like iterate over the components and update those html elements so it in uh in the documentation for uh google or for this like google autocomplete thing um we have this fill in address bit where they walk you through how to actually get each component from the place details and then fill those in for like each address using either oh street number and you're going to concatenate them like this and then the route and you're going to concatenate it like this so let's just copy this uh let's copy this whole thing here and we're going to just kind of we'll improve on this and make it our own all right so as we're iterating over each component of those address components the very first thing here is dealing with the address so the route and the street number are in separate they're in separate components so we need to sort of combine those so i'm going to say this dot line 1 target value is equal to the component long name plus the uh this dot line one target.value so this is just kind of setting that the value for that hidden input for line one equal to the long name for the component so this is going to be the street number plus whatever we already have so that's in case we're iterating over the components and we encounter the route before the street number or something and then otherwise we're going to concatenate this dot line one target dot value with the short name i wish they really just broke this up and made it easy so you could just say like give me address line one two three uh city state zip etc etc but i know that's not globally the same way that everything works so instead this is what we've got to work with all right so for postal code here what we're going to do is say this dot postal underscore code target this is a little odd when you first start out when we have a target that has an underscore in it that has that carries over but if you have a dash i think it ends up being camel case or something but either way this is what we want to do is uh postal code target.value and then here we're going to say this.postal code target.value and i'm going to do the same thing here and here so when you have a postal code uh at least in the united states the first part of it tells like where the box is or something or like the the sort of like town where the box is the postal code and then there's a suffix which tells like which specific box and then like the number is like which number in the box kind of uh i don't know yeah it's postal code suffix is nice to have especially if you're sending physical mailers so we like to hang on to that locality this is uh what we call city so this dot city target.value and then state is going to be this dot state value dot our state target dot value and then country is going to be this does country target value and i like to use the short name for country so that's just us or ca or mx or whatever instead of the whole written out country situation and then long term if you wanted to you could build a lookup table and look up by the the short name all right let's just see if this works so now we've got these these inputs down below and as we type into our input box and select one we expect i don't know why we've broken the debugger there we expect that it's going to be filled in here and it totally is look at that so we now have values for address line one line two there doesn't actually there is not actually line twos here let's see um like i don't know wells apartment no uh i don't know whatever we'll just leave line two now line two out for now and but otherwise we've got our our address city state postal code and the country is populated the two other things that we need is the latitude and longitude so let's go add hidden inputs for those so we're going to have a lat and a long and this is going to be lat and long and let's see here so inside of our address controller we need to add two new targets for lat and long okay and then when our place is selected we need to set the geometry so if there's no geometry then we're just going to return early otherwise we're going to say this dot lat target dot value is equal to place dot geometry and for long it's going to be the same thing but lng okay let's see if this works so now if we pick a location one two three uh whatever and we don't get those values populated did we not refresh let's see 23 east greater okay what's going on here uh we've got an error oh if there's no place that geometry okay one two three boom go to elements and look at that we've got a latin long dropped right in there so that is amazing now what we want to do is be able to say uh create listing and have this populate our lat long and all of our address components so it looks like we actually did get address line one but we did not get our latitude and longitude so let's go let those also be passed in as arguments so now we're going to go to the listings controller and add in here lat and long i thought initially when we built this out we might do the geocoding on the server but now that we're using this sort of like address autocomplete thing let's do this on the client so we'll select uh we'll create another one here this is going to be like test test okay we're going to put in some address here we're going to say create listing and now we have an address with the lat long inside of the listing and so yeah that's how uh that's how you can set up the auto complete address feature let's just go really quickly um as a quick recap we'll go back through some of the pieces so we need to accept address line 1 to city state zip country lat long on our listing create controller we also need to go into our we need to go into our gem file to add this stimulus rails gem which we did and this is for um that's so that we can use stimulus js uh then we went over to application pack our javascript um into the packs application.js and we imported controllers and we also installed we ran rails stimulus install to set up the stimulus controllers thing then we added this window init maps function that fired a custom event when the map was loaded and from application html erb we installed the javascript tag for google maps that said as soon as the google map is loaded with our api key that has billing enabled we're going to call this callback function in itmap that's going to trigger the event and when that event fires we are going to use our data action here on our our controller for address that's going to listen for that map loaded event on the window and when it fires it's going to call init google on the address controller which is going to register the autocomplete handler for this input here and then as soon as a place is selected it's going to populate the values for all of these inputs here and so inside of our address controller as soon as we um as we init google after the google javascript is loaded we create a new autocomplete function and then we add a listener that says as soon as the place has changed fire our place selected method which goes through and sets all the values for the components that were selected from um from the google drop down so that is uh that's how we set up autocomplete thank you so much for watching if you're enjoying this series i would really appreciate a thumbs up maybe even a subscribe if you're feeling generous and yeah hope everyone's having a great day if you have any feature requests or things you want to see added to our short-term vacation rental platform let me know down in the comments and yeah otherwise we'll see in the next one [Music]

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