Get started

At the end of this page you will have:

• a real, government-published sanctions list, synced onto your own disk;
• a name on that list, screened and scored, with the reasons that produced the score;
• a name that is not on it, and the one thing an empty result actually means.

One path, no choices along the way. Where you want to know why a step is what it is, Explanation answers it; where you want to do something other than the one path, Guides does.

Install

gem "active_sanction"

$ bundle install

Ruby 3.1 or newer.

Configure a store

A sync needs somewhere to put what it downloads. Name a directory:

ActiveSanction.configure do |c|
  c.storage_dir = "./sanctions-data"
  c.sources     = [:un_consolidated]
end

Sync one list

un_consolidated — the UN Security Council’s list — is one file and the smallest of the seven this gem reads, so this step takes seconds rather than minutes.

report = ActiveSanction.sync!
puts report

1 source in 2.83s: 1 updated
  un_consolidated  updated    1011 records  just fetched    2.83s

Read the sync report

report.updated.map(&:source)            # => [:un_consolidated]
report[:un_consolidated].record_count   # => 1011
report[:un_consolidated].age            # => 0

A sync tells you what it did. Hold onto that; it pays off once this is running on a schedule.

Screen a name that matches

Bosco Ntaganda has been on this list since 2005.

hit = ActiveSanction.screen(name: "Bosco Ntaganda", type: :individual).first

hit.score               # => 100.0
hit.matched_name.value  # => "Bosco Ntaganda"

Read the explanation

The score is the sum of these:

hit.explanation.map(&:to_s)
# => ["+100.0 name: matched alias \"Bosco Ntaganda\" (aka)"]

Screen a name that does not match

ActiveSanction.screen(name: "Daniel Ashworth", type: :individual)
# => []

An empty array means nothing over the threshold in the list you hold — it does not mean not sanctioned.

Where to go next

• Guides — for the next job: adding a source, choosing a store, syncing on a schedule.
• Reference — the seven lists, one uniform block each.
• Explanation — why a score is what it is, and where the gem ends and the service begins.