I wanted to make an object that is independent of the Facebook leaderboard and can be accessed and updated by all the users for a Facebook instant game. Can this be achieved by using only Facebook's server?
At this point this can only be accomplished via a server side integration. Instant Games provides three mechanisms to store data:
Leaderboards: clearly according to your post you're already using these, but I did want to add that you can store additional data in a leaderboard as well as a simple score. Each score can have an object with key value pairs associated with it for additional information.
FBInstant.getLeaderboardAsync('my_leaderboard')
.then(function(leaderboard) {
return leaderboard.setScoreAsync(42, '{race: "elf", level: 3}');
})
Player Data: a player can have data stored for them that is not accessible to other players.
FBInstant.player
.setDataAsync({
achievements: ['medal1', 'medal2', 'medal3'],
currentLife: 300,
})
Player Stats: A player can also have stats stored for them that are not accessible to other players. The main difference between player stats and player data is that stats support an atomic increment operation, and in future may be shown outside of the game (e.g. on a Facebook user's profile).
FBInstant.player
.setDataAsync({
achievements: ['medal1', 'medal2', 'medal3'],
currentLife: 300,
})
Other kinds of data we are considering include context data, which would be tied to a context. We are currently not investigating adding any type of global data blob, as these tend to have lots of synchronization problems in general and cannot easily be generalized.
It would be interesting to learn more about your use case to see if it is something we could support in future.
Related
I have ads on Facebook driving traffic to our site.
I set this on land
fbq('init', 'my_id', {
external_id: "d1fd01cb777cdcdbf5161db889bf841e"
})
and later if we have an actual purchase I send an offline purchase event using extern_id to match on.
[{
:match_keys => {
:extern_id => "d1fd01cb777cdcdbf5161db889bf841e"
},
:event_time => 1579464000,
:event_name => "Purchase",
:value => 5.0,
:currency => "USD",
:order_id => "8431715",
:custom_data => {
:event_source => "affiliate"
}
}]
however I am not seeing the offline events associated with the ads.
Has anyone else had this issue and have they found a solution??
Davinj, if I understood you correctly, you try to send pixel events giving your extren_id and then matching it back to customers who made a purchase as offline conversions? I see several issue with this:
You have your extern_id in pixel's init code instead of event itself. Like standard conversions or at least page view. Also you call it extrn[al]_id which is inconsistent with extern_id.
I doubt that such scenario would work in the first place as offline conversions do not usually play well with pixel and might not be able to have the parameter from pixel as a match key. Even if the do, which you might find via testing, you'll still have to send other match keys to identify the FB user like email, phone number, etc. Here are docs explicitly recommending that: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/offline-conversions#extern-id
When you have a consistent pixel setup and can see proper events with corresponding parameters, you'll be able to see if you idea is viable.
Generally FB explicitly says that extern_id is a user identifier in you system and probably has to be different for every customer. It can be send as a lonely match key only after you already used it once with other match cases to identify an FB user. Otherwise FB just skips such events and you'll see nothing.
Hope it helps.
#Davinj,
There is another way to send offline events via server-side-api to your pixel's dataset:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/server-side-api
I think these should match up as they show in the same pixel when using event manager.
I had the same assumptions as you but I think their offline conversions is for people who didn't land on your site before converting. Maybe just saw your advert or something.
I have absolutelly the same question as dan here - Facebook conversion pixel with "server to server" option . There was written, that there was no way, but it was 2013, so I hope something changed.
So, is there any way to call facebook pixel events (e.g. CompleteRegistration) from server side now?
I can describe situation in more details. Imagine, that user visits our site, where fb pixel tracks 'PageView' of course. When user passes form and sends his phone number, we call 'Lead' event. But then we need to track one more event, when our manager successfully confirmes this user! Of course, it happens on other computer and so on, so there is no idea, how to "connect" to base user.
I've seen a lot of documentation departments like this, but I can't fully understand even if it's possible or not.
Logically, we need to generate specific id for user (or it can be phone number really), when 'Lead' event is called. Then, we should use this id to 'CompleteRegistration' for that user. But I can't understand, how to do it technically.
It would be gratefull, if somebody could explain it.
P.S. As I understand, it is fully available in API for mobile apps. Is it ok idea to use it for our situation, if there is no other solution?
Use Offline Conversions to record events that happen after a user has left your website. Logging these conversions, technically, is very easy. Setting everything up takes a little effort
tldr; check the code below
Follow setup steps in the FB docs (Setup steps 1-5) which are:
Setup facebook Business Manager account
Add a new app to Business Manager account
Create an Ad account, if you don't already have one
Create a System User for the ad account
After the setup, follow Upload Event Data steps on the same page, steps 1-3 to create an offline event set and associate it with your ad. These can be carried out in the Graph API Explorer by following the links in the examples. These can be done programmatically, but is out of the scope of making the event calls from the server for one campaign.
Once you have created the event set, then you can upload your CompleteRegistration events!
You will need to make a multipart form data request to FB, the data key will be an array of your conversion events. As #Cbroe mentioned, you must hash your match keys (the data you have available about your user to match them with a FB user) before sending to FB. The more match keys you are able to provide, the better chance at matching your user. So if you can get their email and phone at the same time, you're much more likely to match your user.
Here's an example of the call to FB using node.js:
var request = require('request')
// The access token you generated for your system user
var access_token = 'your_access_token'
// The ID of the conversion set you created
var conversionId = 'your_conversion_set_id'
var options = {
url: 'https://graph.facebook.com/v2.12/' + conversionId + '/events',
formData: {
access_token: access_token,
upload_tag: 'registrations', //optional
data: [{
match_keys: {
"phone": ["<HASH>", "<HASH>"]
},
currency: "USD",
event_name: "CompleteRegistration",
event_time: 1456870902,
custom_data: { // optional
event_source: "manager approved"
},
}]
}
}
request(options, function(err, result) {
// error handle and check for success
})
Offline Conversion Docs
Facebook has now a Server-Side API: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/server-side-api/get-started
Implementing this is similar to implementing the offline events outlined in the accepted answer.
Keep in mind that it will always be cumbersome to track and connect events from the browser and from your server. You need to share a unique user id between the browser and server, so that Facebook (or any other analytics provider) will know that the event belongs to the same user.
Tools like mixpanel.com and amplitude.com may be more tailored to your needs, but will get very expensive once you move out of the free tier (100+ EUR at mixpanel, 1000+ EUR at Amplitude, monthly). Those tools are tailored towards company success, whereas Facebook is tailored towards selling and measuring Facebook ads.
I'm using the JavaScript SDK flavor of the Dropbox Datastore API with a web app for mobile and desktop. When the recordsChanged event fires while the app is offline, object data about those changes are generated but the changes can't sync to the datastore until the app is online again.
The event data can be checked against the settings table, for instance, like this:
e.affectedRecordsForTable("settings")
But the array data returned has a lot of layers to wade through.
[t_datastore: t_deleted: false_managed_datastore: t_record_cache: t_rid: "startDate"_tid: "settings"__proto__: t]
I would like to capture the "has been synced" or the "not yet synced" status of each change (each array index) so that I can store the data still waiting to sync in case the session is lost (user closes the app/browser or OS kills the app process). But I also want to know if/when the data does eventually sync successfully. Where can I find the property holding this data?
I found my answer. Steve Marx has a post on the Dropbox developer blog that covers the information I needed. There is a datastore.getSyncStatus().uploading property that returns true or false depending on the state of the datastore sync status.
Source:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/61/checking-the-datastore-sync-status-in-javascript
I am fetching a list of tracks from soundcloud's API using the following query to retrieve the 5 most popular tracks:
https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks?client_id=XXX&order=hotness&limit=5
But recently SoundCloud removed the hotness order. In the blog post they say tracks can instead be sorted by playback_count. But can this be done in the query or do they suggest I pull down the whole SoundCloud library and order them in the client? The following doesn't seem to work:
https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks?client_id=XXX&order=playback_count&limit=5
So how would one retrieve the top tracks on SoundCloud?
The solution was to use the undocumented calls for the explorer feature that SoundCloud itself uses (I used the dev tools in Chrome to check the AJAX calls).
https://api.soundcloud.com/explore/sounds/category?limit=L&client_id=XXX
This appears to use some sort of sorting on the popularity of the songs. The songs can then be filtered on only music by checking the "grouping" attribute. I then have to resolve the list of IDs to actual songs which can be done with the (documented, official) API call:
https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks?ids=1,2,3&client_id=XXX
This seems to work perfectly and I also get the added benefit of an even distribution among genres. But of course, this can stop working at any moment since the API calls are undocumented and perhaps not meant for public use.
Just wanted to provide an update. It seems soundcloud has moved to v2 of the explore API call.
Use this to get a list of categories:
https://api.soundcloud.com/explore/v2
And this to get tracks from a category:
https://api-v2.soundcloud.com/explore/metal?limit=10&offset=0
So far it seems to without a key, although I have no idea how long that will last.
EDIT: So the 2nd url doesn't seem to allow cross-origin, but so far this does work, though it only returns the trackID not the full information
https://api.soundcloud.com/explore/v2/metal?limit=50&consumer_key=XXX
check here, soundcloud removed order by hotness.
Has order by hotness been removed from Soundclouds API
so, for now, only order by date is possible.
I have built a Facebook app using OpenGraph that permits the users to write reviews on concerts, so that I've defined a concert_id attribute on which the user can insert a review.
Now I would like to show all the reviews inserted for a certain concert_id but cannot find a way. If I do (in JS)
FB.api('/me/MY_APP:action', { limit: 0}, function(response) {
console.log(response);
});
I get all items. This app has to be consumed by mobile, I think it is bad to get all items and, then, filtering only the concert_id i need. What do I have to do to apply a where condition in OpenGraph to a custom action?
As far as I can tell from the API and the Facebook developer pages, it's not possible to filter a call by custom action property using the public Open Graph API.
Two options I can think of:
Option 1:
Implement the category filter by creating custom category objects:
if "review" is a custom action and
GET https://graph.facebook.com/me/[name_space]:review
returns all review actions then
GET https://graph.facebook.com/me/[name_space]:review/scifi_movie
GET https://graph.facebook.com/me/[name_space]:review/action_movie
return actions specific to movie type, where scifi_movie and action_movie are custom objects. You would need to create one object type for each category.
Option 2:
Implement a custom action for each category, e.g.
review_scifi_movie
review_action_movie
These are not particularly elegant solutions but perhaps useful as a hack if nothing else works and you really don't want to do filtering on client side.
The Facebook API will not return individual published objects for a particular action, but that's not your only problem. By the look of it, you're trying to bring in ALL the reviews given for a concert, right? (Meaning those by other users too).
The "/me/" part of the Facebook API call will only return those published actions made by the user that is currently logged in. That won't work for you, as you want those of all your users
The only suggestion I can give is to create a simple web service, where you store all the reviews given for the various concerts. Use this service to pull in reviews given for a particular concert. (I use a similar methodology for reviews in an app of my own).
I dont understand javascript or opengraph..
But when I required in JAVA to fetch reviews made by any user I have used FQL for that and It retrived me all the reviews and FQL also used to fetch all the tables related to Facebook.
I don't think that you can pull that off with the JS SDK.
You can do that in your server though, and since this is a mobile app (or has a mobile version) then that's another good reason to remove this from the client responsibility.
In the server side you can ask facebook for the published actions as you posted, filter them and then return the response.
Another thing that you can do is to save each published action in your db (on each action post you should get an id back from facebook, just persist that) and then you can easily filter the published actions according to what ever criteria you want/need (since you are no longer restricted by the facebook api).
The open graph thing is still pretty new and not tat mature, for example you can't use FQL with it, something that could have been handy for your case.
Regardless though I think that a server solution is best for calculations when mobile is concerned.
i don't know exactly but try this
if (session.authResponse) {
FB.api('/me', {
fields: 'name, picture' // here mention your fields
},
function(response) {
if (!response.error) {
//here response value
});