--- title: Fixing Google maps address autocomplete bug with stimulus slug: fixing-google-maps-address-autocomplete-bug-with-stimulus published_at: 2022-03-16 10:00:02 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:39 +0000 summary: description: #rails #rubyonrails tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript] views: 583 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/fixing-google-maps-address-autocomplete-bug-with-stimulus youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oHdSy_fhWw youtube_id: 2oHdSy_fhWw embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/2oHdSy_fhWw thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2oHdSy_fhWw/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Fixing Google maps address autocomplete bug with stimulus *Published: March 16, 2022* *Views: 583* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oHdSy_fhWw) [![Fixing Google maps address autocomplete bug with stimulus](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2oHdSy_fhWw/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oHdSy_fhWw) ## Description #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript hey what's up welcome back in this episode it's going to be a quickie we're just going to fix a little bug with some javascript that we've been using inside of clearbnb this is not going to be like part of an official part of the series but yeah i just want to show how to fix this little bug that i found so what happens today is when you go to create a new listing this address input should be populated with the address autocomplete like you should be able to type in one two three and it should draw have like a drop down list of you know do you want main street do you want whatever whatever and if we open up the console here and then refresh the page or like hard refresh the page now we're seeing this error init map is not a function so we're yeah there's just like some errors that are firing as that as that happens let me take you through super quickly how this form is set up so we have a div that wraps that address element so the we have a div that wraps up this entire address element there was a whole video where we showed how to set this up and we're using a stimulus controller called address that listens for an event on the on the window object so on the window when map loaded is called then the address controller calls the init google function so if we go look at the address controller then we have this init google function so what is this a nick google function and like when is it actually going to be called etc etc well again that depends on when this map loaded event is fired and that is going to be event type it's a custom event type it's firing on the window object and that happens inside of our um inside of our sort of like base javascript file so we look at our application.js for the pack we have this custom function that we're attaching to window called init map and this init map function is going to say okay we're going to fire a new event called map loaded on the window so we're going to dispatch that event on the window so when we refresh the page it's supposed to be firing on the window so we can see down here that the address controller is being connected and the menu controller is being connected but this thing isn't actually like firing up and if we hard refresh it okay now we can see 123 nashua road whatever we can like actually see some some things are typing or we're able to type into it we also see this placeholder that says enter a location so sometimes it loads sometimes it doesn't load like that time i just load it and it's not actually showing up so what's uh first thing we need to do is like start adding a little bit of logging to debug what's happening so what i want to do is i want to know when this init map function is being called so i'm just going to say console.log init map was called that's going to at least tell me when a nit map is being called and then if we go back to the address controller we have a log statement when the address controller is connected we have another log statement when google maps is initialized so let's refresh the page again so we see a nit map was called and then after init map was called the address controller is connected so a knit map is being called oh yeah where is that even being called by right application uh html erb so in the head here we're loading up google maps and we're saying uh after you're done loading up uh google maps what do we want you to do well we want you to call this callback so we give a query string parameter when we're loading the google maps javascript file and inside of the google maps javascript it knows if we passed it some name to call that name on the window and that's the way that google maps can tell us like okay this the our javascript is loaded so what's happening is that google maps is actually loading before our local stuff is loading right before our local javascript is loading in some cases in this case it didn't right like our menu controller connected and our address controller connected before a nitmap was called and if it's called before then it's totally fine because google maps is there and then we call google maps etc etc and so then we end up with a working address input so how do we how do we fix this well number one the problem is that google was loading before our controller and so if google loads before our controller if google maps loads before our controller then what we can do is in the connect we can just call in it google because the only thing we were waiting for was this google this like google maps object to be ready so that we could mount our listeners and attach it to our stuff so what we're going to do is we're just going to add this check that's here and we're going to say if window.google then we're going to call this.init google inside of our connect handler so if it's not initialized or if google isn't loaded before the controller then we need that data action that will listen for the map loaded event that fires in the window and then it'll call our netgoogle function otherwise if it loads before us it should call this so after we add that now it should just work like every single time and we should never have a case where it's not loading so even now you can like look at the order right so a nitmap is being called after but in this case a nitmap was called before the address controller was loaded and then inside of the connect function for that address stimulus controller we knew that google was loaded and so we were able to call init google and now we can see our address autocomplete the cool thing about this is that now when we create the listing i need to probably put some stuff in here whatever now when we create the listing nightly price oh gosh okay it's gonna like we need to save that input but now we can get the latin long and what's cool about that is we can start to drop pins on a map for where the listings are so yeah that was just a little bug that we added earlier wanted to come in and fix it that was one of those cases where like it works sometimes but not all the time and it's sort of unclear why but yeah hopefully that's helpful for someone thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one [Music] you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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