pdsphil / ruby-merlin

== Notes

This code has come straight from a production Rails app. It will soon be a Rails plugin, but for now, I suggest putting 
it in the lib/ directory of your Rails project.

You must have a valid Merlin account to test or use this code.

== ID data via Merlin

To use the IDDetail classes, load irb or script/console. You must "require 'id_detail'" to proceed. Once you have the 
libraries required, there are a few simple statements to call the Merlin API given a SSN:

sub = API::IDDetail::Subject.new("your SSN")
sub.locate

After calling the locate() method, the sub object will have a parsed set of data in its identity attribute - 
'sub.identity' to access.

== Configuration

The id_detail directory must contain a file called 'config.yml' using the following format:

# Merlin API username and password
username: your_api_username
password: your_api_password

It is recommended that you symlink this file to the directory after deploy for security reasons. This file is also 
required for development mode - just fill with dummy data.

== Tests

To run the rspec tests, make sure you are in the id_detail directory and type 'spec -cfs spec/' - these tests do not hit 
the API directly, they use fixtures.