CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosfacebook
Ted
Ted

Reputation: 3885

How do facebook and my iOS communicate

I'd like to use iOS to post on my users's facebook walls/tickers/news feeds. I learned that opengraph can be very specific about the actions users take inside my app, and I'd like to integrate them into my project.

I think I realize now I am going to need my own server running for opengraph actions to work ,right? or is this not a must? from what I understand, the server supplies the basic data to facebook for the post, like image, main text, secondary text etc... Is my server needed just to supply the facebook posts' data? Is my server called everytime a facebook page is loaded with my app's contents? Or is it done only once, and facebook is copying the posts' content into facebook's servers? What happens if my servers is not responsive etc?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 53

Answers (1)

rightparen
rightparen

Reputation: 1693

The short answer: yes, you probably need a server.

The longer answer: The facebook documentation on Open Graph is much better than what I can fit here. If you have not already, check out this page and its links: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/.

A published action on facebook is a tuple { user, action, object }. The types of actions and objects are defined in the facebook developer application (developers.facebook.com/apps).

The content of the post is generated by your iOS client. The post has data that references the action by name and the object by its URL.

The individual objects that your app defines are typically represented by pages on your web server. These pages are scraped by Facebook to extract metadata that defines the object, including images and text. I do not know of safe assumptions you can make about when the object's page will be scraped.

It is possible to create sample objects when you are editing your object types (developers.facebook.com/apps, create or edit one of your apps, "Edit Open Graph", "Add Sample Data"). However, because these are intended for experimentation, they are fairly limited in what you can do with them.

Upvotes: 1

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