My facebook instant game app which have following url: https://www.facebook.com/instantgames/279246242904501/
When I hit the above game URL, Facebook website load the actual game inside iframe. I just want to pass URL parameter to my game app which I could receive using JavaScript inside my game code.
Can this be possible?
You can use link contexts. This is a currently undocumented feature, but if you navigate to fb.gg/play/{your_game}/{ref} you will end up in a unique context based on the value of ref. You can then use context.getID() to determine which context you are in.
Note, this can't be used to pass arbitrary date into the game because there's no way to read the string value of ref. There is currently no mechanism by which it is possible to do that.
Related
I have a website where the URLs have some tracking parameters that do not affect the page that is displayed i.e. the URL is of the form http://mywebsite.com/page1?tracking1=aaa&tracking2=bbb and 'tracking1' and 'tracking2' are just tracking parameters used for some other purpose and do no determine the page that is displayed. The page that is displayed is always 'http://mywebsite.com/page1' irrespective of the values of these tracking parameters.
I have included the facebook like button on my website pages and facebook treats each of these URLs, including the tracking parameters, as separate pages. I'm not able to get facebook to ignore these tracking parameters and just consider the URL without tracking parameters as a page. So, I'm storing my own like count against the actual URL (when I get a callback on the like action) and displaying it next to the like button.
Is displaying own like count next to facebook like button against their usage policy? Is there a better way to do this?
Is there any particular functional reason you're using GET (ie URL) variables to store your tracking?
If you can push them into POST instead, or use cookies or sessions for your tracking, you can simplify your URLs and Facebook should treat it as a single page.
If you have to use GET due to, for example, the links coming from external websites, you could use a pass-through URL to do your tracking, before forwarding to the main page. ie someone clicks the link to redirect?tracking1=aaa&tracking2=bbb&page=page1
And redirect, as you may have guessed, does what you need to do with your tracking before forwarding the user on to page1.
I think there are a few similar questions that seem to suggest using app_data in the signed request (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/signed_request/) but I'm not sure if it will be possible to do what I am trying to achieve with it as I've never used it before.
If I have my Facebook 'Tab' Url as follows:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/PAGE_TITLE/PAGE_ID?sk=app_APP_ID
What I want to do is add an extra parameter on the end as follows:
&WT.mc_id=email-uk-8014
The reason for this is for tracking purposes and links will be sent out of the form
http://www.facebook.com/pages/PAGE_TITLE/PAGE_ID?sk=app_APP_ID&WT.mc_id=email-uk-8014
and the extra parameter will allow us to track the campaign id.
As you can see I have no way of knowing the value of the parameter beforehand as it depends on the link clicked by the user so is it possible to somehow get the value of the WT.mc_id parameter inside my iframe app?
app_data is the only parameter passed through other than the page ID and user's basic details (locale and if they do/don't like the page) - you'll need to use that for any sort of campaign tracking (or link elsewhere and redirect to the tab after capturing your analytics data)
you can pass get variables in facebook but only in canvas application
you just have to use $_REQUEST['xxx'] to retrieve the data.
you should not pass the param in href of facebook. Instead just make linking inside your app so that you can track the events. As you will be in iframe and having complete control you can do same on your own site.
I have a like button on my page that I'm hosting as a FB app. Question is: Leaving the data-href blank on the like, sets my canvas url "www.example.com/page.aspx" for liking. Window.location.href or window.top.location all point to the canvas URL.
I want the users to like the app URL instead of the canvas URL. Anyway I can get this in the code behind? or in javascript? I do not want to specify this, because I want to do this for multiple applications each one to point to their own app url to like.
Usually you have to somehow initialize the app in order to work with it so in your config you should have a canvas name (or namespace).
Another method would be to query the graph-api for convas details. The query should look something like this:
var app_data = FB.api("/you_app_id");
You should test it first with Graph API Explorer . And also remember that this is an expensive call if you're doing it on each page request. You will get an array with all the info about your currently loaded app including the canvas name. Having the canvas name you can form the app URL like this: http://apps.facebook.com/your-canvas-name
Short answer: No!
Longer answer: You cannot get any information from a frame in another domain. This is for security purposes. So if you try:
console.log(window.top.location.href);
...when the frames are in the same domain, you'll get the url. Otherwise, you'll get a security exception.
Are you able to send php variables to a application in a tab (in facebook)?
I have built a system which sends a wall post to a friend, which includes a link with a php variable in it. This variable needs to be processed by the app, but I cant work out how to (or if I can) do this.
Yes, you can pass URL Parameters to an iFrame Tab App.
Pass the parameter: http://www.facebook.com/MyPage?sk=MyApp&app_data=any_string_here
Receive the parameter: $app_data = $signed_request["app_data"];
See more:
http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=92661
I think this is a duplicate of the following question:
Facebook Application Tab -> External Linking with PHP
It does not seem to be possible to pass URL parameters into a Facebook application that is in a Tab. You can do it on the Application page however.
Edit: as per the answer below, this behaviour has changed. Details here: http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=92661
I'm trying to implement a feature like that where a user inputs a url and when displaying that url I want to have a custom display (an embed object if it's a video from youtube, a thumbnail if it's an image link, title and excerpt of body if it's a normal link).
How can such a feature be realized?
There is a new idea called oEmbed that a few sites support (Flickr, Vimeo and a few others) that addresses this problem. oEmbed site
Otherwise, just check the site against a list of ones you pick and then pull out the relevant bits to construct an embed link.
I liked the idea of oEmbed a lot but unfortunately it doesn't has that much adoption yet.
oohEmbed tries to solve this issue by building oEmbed for many websites.
For the feature to work, it needs the server's interaction where I believe the following scenario is how it works
Assume that we have the site humanzz.com and that it provides such feature
A user enters a url on the humanzz.com's webpage and presses a button like facebooks' preview button
An AJAX call is made to a dedicated page on humanzz.com
humanzz.com does calls the remote website and gets its data
The AJAX call now returns the page's data (oEmbed JSON object)
This involves so much server's overhead.
I really wanted to do it using JavaScript as the server's role was only to bypass "Same Origin Policy"'s restrictions.
oohEmbed allows bypassing the server's step by specifying a callback parameter to oohEmbed so that the JSON object returned is passed to a callback function on your page.
An example illustrating this is as follows
Add a script tag dynamically to your page
< script type="text/javascript" src="http://oohembed.com/oohembed/?url=http%3A//www.amazon.com/Myths-Innovation-Scott-Berkun/dp/0596527055/&callback=myCallBack">< /script>
This would result in executing myCallback(oEmbedJSONObject) which is great.
The problem with that solution is you still have to have a fallback for websites that don't have oEmbed representations.
For the embedded things, I have been using auto_html ( https://github.com/dejan/auto_html) with great success (vimeo, youtube, images) and even added soundcloud myself. But I am still looking for a "thumbnail" generation with an image and text facebook-like.
I guess you have to construct it by yourself by manually parsing the kind of URL you get.
If it is an image url, well then you just have to rescale it and in case the user clicks on it, then handle that by opening the original one somehow.
If it is a link to some youtube video, then you have to take a look at how the embedding of Youtube videos works. You can just copy the code that is provided by Youtube itself, and then exchange the parts with the URL to the video with the URL you got from your user.
I did never implement something like that, but I assume it should work somehow like this.