Hungry Machine

Developing applications for Facebook is a pain. The tunnel approach helps a lot to ease that pain but even then I prefer to start a FB app as a regular application, polish the logic, and then convert it to the Facebook one by adding FBML and such. At the early stages of the development I have the mocked parameter in config/facebook.yml set to true and keep this code in config/initializers/facebook.rb:

PERSON_PROFILE_URL = "http://www.facebook.com/profile.php"

FACEBOOK_CONFIG = YAML.load_file("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/facebook.yml")[RAILS_ENV] || {}

if FACEBOOK_CONFIG['mocked']

  class Facebook::FBMLController

    require 'ostruct'
    FB_SESSION = OpenStruct.new(:session_user_id => 1, :session_key => "12345", :is_valid? => true)

    def fbsession; FB_SESSION; end

    def require_facebook_install; true; end

    def redirect_to(url); super; end

    def url_for(*params); super; end

  end

  module Facebook::Acts::FbUser
    module InstanceMethods
      def friends
        (self.class.find(:all) - [ self ]).collect(&:uid)
      end
    end
  end 

end

It mocks out just enough of Facebook on Rails functionality to use FBMLController and acts_as_fb_user from the beginning without Facebook backend.

Some facebook applications might have multiple entries. For example, a user might be adding an application (action – new) or replying to an invitation (action – reply, param – id). Since the UI for Facebook application configuration allows to provide only static Post-Add URL it might seem like there is no way to route users back to the original action if they tried to reach when the application has not been installed for them. Luckily, we have full control on the destination via the next paramater of the post install URL. All we need is to build a URL using the incoming call parameters with the exclusion of Facebook-specific ones.

This is an example for Facebook on Rails based code that might go to the application controller:

class ApplicationController < Facebook::FBMLController

protected

  before_filter :require_facebook_install 

  def require_facebook_install    
    if in_canvas? && !fbsession.is_valid?
      redirect_to fbsession.get_install_url(:next => url_for(post_install_params))
      false
    end
  end

  def post_install_params
    params.merge(:init => true).delete_if { |k, v| k.starts_with?('fb_sig') }
  end

end

Notice that the code sets the init parameter so it can be used to identify a post install call

Sometimes it is useful to do some action on a Facebook user right after your application has been installed by the user. For example, you might want to push some default FBML to user’s profile in case he does not complete the action you expect him to do after installation. Facebook application configuration allows to provide Post-Add URL to route users to the destination url after the application install. It could be a dedicated post_add action or, in case of a default action where you have some code in the controller and since Facebook limits amount of redirects you can use, it could be a parameter to the url, like &init=true, used to identify that it was a post-install action and execute on it.