@highvizability wrote a great piece last year about how to geocode a user’s address using R. You can read the article here and download a great sample workbook:

http://www.dataplusscience.com/Geocoding%20in%20Tableau%20using%20R.html 

Let’s do the same thing but with someone’s IP address, shall we?

Tableau has already documented one method to approach this, but technology moves on. FYI, I wouldn’t use the following technique if I’m going to plot thousands of  marks / ip addresses on a map – it would probably take too long. That said…

First, I found another great blog by a gentleman who figured out how to make ip-based geocoding go in R. You can read article here. Everything I did is based on his work.

Essentially, I’ve dumbed-down what Andrew put together and modified his function so that it only returns the latitude and longitude of the ip address being encoded:

freegeoip <- function(ip, format = ifelse(length(ip)==1,‘list’,’dataframe’))

{
     if (1 == length(ip))
     {
          # a single IP address
          require(rjson)
          url <- paste(c(“http://freegeoip.net/json/”, ip), collapse=“)
          ret <- fromJSON(readLines(url, warn=FALSE))
          ret <- data.frame(t(unlist(ret)))
          latlon <- paste(ret$latitude,ret$longitude,sep=”,“)
          return(latlon)

     }
}

The function above requires the rjson package, which lives in CRAN.

The function must also be available to your RServ server. This is generally accomplished by finding the Rserv.config file for RServ and adding a reference to a file which holds the text for your function.

For example, I dropped the text above into a file called geo.txt, and then plugged that value into the config file like so:

After that, all the work happens in Tableau,

You’ll create an expression which calls the function and passes it the ip address (in this case, named [ip] in my dataset):

Then, create two additional expressions which parse out the latitude and longitude:

…and you’re done!

You can download samples from here:  http://1drv.ms/PUO69Q