Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

February 3, 2012ByJustin Moore

This week, we published a How-To on subscribing to data changes using the Real-time Updates API, as well as a games update on driving more discovery for games and shared Single Sign-On best practices for iOS and Android mobile developers. Lastly we announced a guide on How to Migrate your Application Profile Page.

Ability to set the Password on Test Users

We have long had a feature on the Developer App to enable you to create a new test user and to switch to it as needed. We've heard that it was still difficult for developers to test their mobile apps. To address this need, we have added the ability to set the password of the a user now from the Developer App. If you need to change the password of a test user, visit the "Roles" section of the Developer App and click on the "Set Password" link.

Open Graph Actions Continue to Be Approved

This is a reminder that we have started approving Open Graph actions. If you are new to the Open Graph, please review the Tutorial on how to use the Open Graph to integrate your app with Facebook. Please review and check your actions against the required criteria by using the submissions checklist prior to submission.

Reminder that Access Tokens are not to be shared between applications

Please remember that you cannot share access tokens between applications. The access token you receive is only for use within the application for which it was granted, and developers on Facebook platform have a responsibility to take appropriate steps to ensure the security of those tokens.

Posting historical Open Graph activity

Apps can post historical actions to help people fill out their timelines and/or queue up activity from an offline state. For example, a photo app can let people add photos from their past vacations to their timeline.

Any past activity that is posted will not appear in News Feed or ticker. Past activity will have the same privacy that the user chose for the app, and users can control and delete the activity from their Activity Log or directly from timeline.

You must prompt users before publishing historical activity and providing explicit controls. For example, Goodreads, a book recommendations website, created a settings page to let people select which activities to include on their timeline:

Upcoming Breaking Changes

Upcoming Breaking Changes on February 15, 2012

Pages Insights Metrics Deprecations. We are in the process of deprecating some old Page Insights. We announced this in a number of forums, but failed to outline this change in our Platform Roadmap per our breaking change policy. Our apologies. You can find a full list of the Insights to be deprecated from the Insights documentation. These Insights will be completely removed from API on Feb 15th 2012. Please make all necessary updates as soon as possible so that you can transition smoothly.
Improved Auth Dialog. On February 15, 2012, all apps will be enabled for the improved dialog, but those that haven’t fully configured their dialog can disable the setting in the Developer App until March 1, at which time it will be turned on for all apps.

Upcoming Breaking Changes on March 1, 2012

Removing the third settled callback from Payments. To ensure the best experience for users, we are asking developers to ensure that they are fulfilling the order in the callback with status=placed. We assure you that once we call you with status=placed and you respond with settled, the transaction will be complete and you will be paid. You should not be waiting for the settled callback before fulfilling the order.

To reduce confusion we are completely removing the settled callback. For more information please read here.
Returning up to 960px wide photos in "photo" FQL table and photo Graph API. On 1st March 2012 we will begin returning photos up to 960px wide in the src_big field of the photo FQL table, as well as the source field of the photo object, increasing the current max width of 720px.

New Breaking Changes

Deprecation of group_type and group_subtype columns from group FQL table. Facebook will be deprecating the group_type and group_subtype columns of the group FQL tables. Please ensure that your applications are not utilizing these columns. These will be eliminated on May 1, 2012.
XMPP Connections must be done over TLS. Apps connecting to Facebook's XMPP service will be required to use STARTTLS for all connections. We will start rejecting unencrypted connections on June 1, 2012.
Changes to Domain Insights Metrics. Some domain insights metrics (i.e., domain_active_users_*) were removed in May, 2011, but we failed to update the documentation at that time. These have been removed from the documentation and we have corrected the list of metrics that were deprecated last year. We sincerely apologize for this miscommunications.

Please refer to the Platform Roadmap for more info.