Server | Google Maps Distance Calculator

[putskan]

Feature Description

A function (management script) the calculates and saves the top 10 closest Activities for each School.

Why do we need this feature?

To be able to calculate distance between activities & schools. This helps recommending relevant activities to school staff.

What does the proposed solution look like? (Balsamiq / Technical Overview)

1. First, we need to add lat, lan fields to School & Activity models (like Organization has). School Model can be found in schools/models.py, Activity inorganizations/models.py`.

2. Add nearby_activities django's ManyToManyField to School model.

3. Apply the changes to the DB using:

   python manage.py makemigrations
   python manage.py migrate

4. Then, we need to create a management script file (similar to create_test_data.py script).

5. The script can be ran the script using python manage.py <script_name> (e.g., python manage.py create_test_data)

6. In the script we need to:

   • get all School & Activities and their location from DB

     
     from server.schools.models import School
     from server.organizations.models import Activity

   School.objects.all() Activity.objects.all()

   
   - For each school, get all the activities in 30km **air** distance. using something like [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27928/calculate-distance-between-two-latitude-longitude-points-haversine-formula).
   - Get the closest activities from them based on **travel** distance. Use [Google Maps Distance API](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distance-matrix/usage-and-billing#distance-matrix) for that purpose.
   - Populate the `nearby_activities` field for each school using the Activities found.
   * **Note:** we use air distance to narrow down the options and reduce time & costs.
   * **Note:** please don't spam Google API if not needed as it might get expensive.

How to test?

Pytest. use a mock for the API endpoint.

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[putskan]

Google Maps distance api pricing:

• 5.00$ per 1000 lookups. source.
• Free 200$ per month. source.
• Daily quota limit is also available. source.