I am working on a Flex AS3 application and wanted to add the Facebook Like button inside the app. I am unable to find any API or anything apart from the http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like code generator.
Any ideas on how this might be accomplished? I am quite new to the recent changes in the Facebook Platform, so any info would be appreciated.
A direct "like" button should not be possible, since Facebook needs to sandbox the whole thing. Both like button formats (iframe and xfbml) use a sandboxed iframe, so nobody but facebook can set "likes" or know anything about the user.
For that to work with Flash, I think facebook would have to provide the button itself as a SWF file so you can load it in Flash. Then it can create a sandbox within itself and thus load the user information safely. Very much like the Chromeless Youtube Player, where it's almost impossible for Flash to access the actual FLV URL (even through introspection).
But even so, I don't think this would provide enough security... realize that you are dealing with very private user information and credentials here.
The only way I know you can "like" stuff through Flash is first doing the whole Facebook Connect thing (several popup windows asking the user for permissions) and then using the API of your choice to do the actual "liking", for instance, with the Graph API:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api#publishing
The closest information I could find are these 2 items so far. Hope it helps you in your journey.
Facebook Developer Site: Source
Facebook like button in flash
I hate answering "no" to a question because what I really mean is "I don't know and I can't find a way". I'm sure your Google-fu is as good as mine. All I can see are Facebook forum posts like this where people are asking the same question and no one is answering.
The examples they give of the like button are either embedded in iFrames or using XFBML <fb:like ../> tag. There are no examples of how to like something using their new graph api or either of their old APIs (FQL and REST API).
I had to get a Facebook like button in a html page (looked like a header on the top) and get the swf embedded below. As its a complete flex app in my case, this work around was possible and plausible
Related
I've used services like 'Add This' for a while but now I need to add a couple of specific bits of functionality to an ecommerce order completion page. It's to work like Amazon's order thank you page where it allows you to post a message to Facebook saying something like 'I just bought a widget on Amazon'.
Equally I'm looking for the equivalent in Twitter.
I've added a bunch of OG tags and share buttons but can't get it to do what I need. From further reading it sounds like I might need to create a Facebook app of some sort and use FB ui to create the link to post to the user's wall. I was hoping to do this without getting tangled up in that level of permissions etc but maybe that's not possible any more?
This is being developed on asp.net C#, in case there's a library that I haven't found in my searching.
Can anyone familiar with this type of development point me in the right direction?
For Twitter, the simplest way is to use Web Intents.
For example, if you want to share the text
I love http://example.com
URL encode the text to I%20love%20http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com and use the Twitter Web Intent URI. E.g.
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=I%20love%20http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com
When the user clicks on that link (try it!) or is directed there by your service, they'll be prompted to share that text.
I'm writing an app which involves letting users to share comments on a website, which has a comment form with Google's reCAPTCHA embeded. I would like to load this page via HTTP and display CAPTCHA within my app, so that user can post comments from my app. Is it easy to implement or should I rather try other solution?
EDIT:
I've red reCAPTCHA developer guide. If I would like to embed captcha inside my form, I'd need to insert div element with a proper class, and make a ajax request in order to render captcha. This call would insert an iframe into a given div. What I need is to know how to access that iframe's content without using AJAX.
Turns out we are not supposed to do that kind of tricks with reCAPTCHA.
There is no support for that in API. It seems that it was part of Google's design to prevent that kind of usage.
The only walkaround I could come up with is to implement a WebView widget with JavaScript support, get website via http, and load it into this webview, centering this view around the form we want to post.
It seems like a lot of work though, thus I'm going to simply skip this, if someone successfuly manages to figure it out I'd appreciate a hint :)
I'm running in to a couple of issues and wondered if anyone had any insight. I'm using the latest php-sdk I'm developing a canvas app that has a number of different steps. These steps are spread across multiple pages. Now when I first enter the app everything seems to work fine. The access token is there and I can call the api functions. On the second page (which is linked to in the same iframe) I get OAuth errors. Now if I use this on the 2nd page:
$me = $facebook->getUser();
var_dump($me);
it returns the correct user id, but I still get errors when trying to use an api query (specifically a FQL one in this instance)
Now, bear in mind these links are within the iframe so I was assuming the signed_request is getting lost somewhere, I know facebook normally issues this via a POST. If I set all my links to target="_parent" with a url such as http://apps.facebook.com/myapp/page2.php then everything works fine. Facebook clearly posts the correct info this time. Subsequently, then when I use links that only redirect the iframe it seems to work fine again (implying a cookie is being set somewhere).
Now I've seen other apps that don't have a target="_parent" that seem to work correctly, only ever loading the iframe on subsequent clicks and not the full facebook site. So I can only assume they are storing this info somewhere. I've tried to inspect these apps using httpfox but I can't see anything obvious. Does anyone have any links for best practice with multiple page apps? I know I can get around this using full urls and target="_blank" but I would like to know what's going on here. I've looked through the developer docs and the canvas page examples, but there's nothing obvious to me.
Any help or info would be appreciated
Many Thanks
There is some ways to achieve this
using Facebook JavaScript SDK (which will set cookie for you, so PHP-SDK can rely on it)
issuing POST request to your pages including signed_request from initial page loaded in canvas
I've been checking out facebook connect stuff from the new actionscript 3 library from Adobe. I have been trying to figure out how to use the facebook connect button inside of a flex app.
In an html page you would us the fbml and it would automatically put the facebook connect button on your page and when the user clicks on it it pops up the face div and lets the user login. Well you can't use that in flex. So I could put it on the page containing the swf but, that's why I'm using flex and not html. I've seen it done by the guys at Universal Mind so I know it's possible. I just need a little direction.
I know the function to use in the facebook connect api to cause that login dialog to come up I just can't figure the correct combination.
Chcek out the Create your first Facebook application with Flex tutorial and in particular the section on Add Facebook login.
This should be applicable to Flex. This would be done using the ExternalInterface calls from within Flash.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/external/ExternalInterface.html
In Adobe facebook-actionscript-api there is a class LoginWindow which you can use.
When you need it this window will open like small flash popup window and it will display facebook login page and enable user to login. All needed events will be raised and you should be connected after that. I didn't tested it but from the code looks like what you need.
this developer created this js/flash bridge you are talking about using the ExternalInterface classes. you can download all source files as well. i found it very useful.
http://www.wellconsidered.be/blog/2009/01/04/facebook-connect-to-actionscript-3/
There is also a very clean and elegant solution/tutorial at:
http://www.stevenvh.be/blog/?p=57
Use this API:
http://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/
Look at ConnectDemo.
The sample kind of sucks... it forces you to connect before showing the Flex app.
You need to tweek the example to get it to do what you want.
Also, FB depreciated some of the methods, so you have to look up new methods that aren't depreciated.
I'd love to update the sample, but I don't have the time to dedicated to another project.
I have an ASP.Net application which as desired feature, users would like to be able to take a screenshot. While I know this can be simulated, it would be really great to have a way to take a URL (or the current rendered page), and turn it into an image which can be stored on the server.
Is this crazy? Is there a way to do it? If so, any references?
I can tell you right now that there is no way to do it from inside the browser, nor should there be. Imagine that your page embeds GMail in an iframe. You could then steal a screenshot of the person's GMail inbox!
This could be made safe by having the browser "black out" all iframes and embeds that would violate cross-domain restrictions.
You could certainly write an extension to do this, but be aware of the security considerations outlined above.
Update: You can use a canvas utility function to get a screenshot of a page on the same origin as your code. There's even a lib to allow you to do this: http://experiments.hertzen.com/jsfeedback/
You can find other possible answers here: Using HTML5/Canvas/JavaScript to take screenshots
Browsershots has an XML-RPC interface and available source code (in Python).
I used the free assembly UrlScreenshot.dll which you can download here.
Works nicely!
There is also WebSiteScreenShot but it's not free.
You could try a browser plugin like IE7 Pro for Internet Explorer which allows you to save a screenshot of the current site to a file on disk. I'm sure there is a comparable plugin for FireFox out there as well.
If you want to do something like you described. You need to call an external process that prints the IE output as described here.
Why don't you take another approach?
If you have the need that users can view the same content over again, then it sounds like that is a business requirement for your application, and so you should be building it into your application.
Structure the URL so that when the same user (assuming you have sessions and the application shows different things to different users) visits the same URL, they always see same thing. They can then bookmark the URL locally, or you can even have an application feature that saves it in a user profile.
Part of this would mean making "clean urls", eg, site.com/view/whatever-information-needed-here.
If you are doing time-based data, where it changes as it gets older, there are probably a couple possible approaches.
If your data is not changing on a regular basis, then you could make the "current" page always, eg, site.com/view/2008-10-20 (add hour/minute/second as appropriate).
If it is refreshing, and/or updating more regularly, have the "current" page as site.com/view .. but allow specifying the exact time afterwards. In this case, you'd have to have a "link to this page" type function, which would link to the permanent URL with the full date/time. Look to google maps for inspiration here-- if you scroll across a map, you can always click "link to here" and it will provide a link that includes the GPS coordinates, objects on the map, etc. In that case it's not a very friendly url but it does work quite well. :)