Using mocks at the early stage of FB app development

val — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:50:00 +0000

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.

Hungry Machine » mock

Using mocks at the early stage of FB app development