Recently in samples Category

Sending private messages on Friendster

By
Arne Roomann-Kurrik
on September 24, 2008 11:09 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
I had to write a quick sample today to send a private message to the OWNER on Friendster.  The following sends a message to your Friendster message inbox:

function sendNotification() {
  var params = {};
  params[opensocial.Message.Field.TITLE] =
      "Title of the notification goes here";
  params[opensocial.Message.Field.TYPE] =
      opensocial.Message.Type.PRIVATE_MESSAGE;
  var body="Text of the notification goes here";
  var message = opensocial.newMessage(body, params);
  var recipient = opensocial.DataRequest.PersonId.OWNER;
  opensocial.requestSendMessage(recipient, message,
      onSendNotification);
};

function onSendNotification(resp) {
  if (!resp.hadError() && resp.getData().status == "sent") {
    alert("The message was sent to the OWNER");
  } else {
    alert("There was a problem: " + resp.getErrorMessage());
  }
};

sendNotification();
Note the message type is set to PRIVATE_MESSAGE.  Friendster also supports type NOTIFICATION, but I haven't quite figured out where that shows up, and I get a "Insufficient permissions for action 'publicMessage'" error message when trying PUBLIC_MESSAGE.

Also note that this is for OpenSocial 0.7.  If you're migrating this code to another container on 0.8, you'll need to change the IdSpec stuff (as I've covered before).

Fetch by ID sample

By
Arne Roomann-Kurrik
on September 3, 2008 12:42 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
I needed to write the following sample of code to test fetching people by ID number.  This is an interesting sample because it demonstrates handling an error condition - namely, the "unauthorized" response that you should get when you try to access an account that you don't have permission to request.  On orkut, this means people who don't have your app installed, even if they're your friends.

The following runs in DAfOS:

function onPersonGot(result) {
  var response = result.get("person");
  if (response.hadError()) {
    output("There was a problem fetching this user: " + 
        response.getErrorCode());
  } else {
    output("Fetched " + 
        result.get("person").getData().getDisplayName());
  }
  gadgets.window.adjustHeight();
};

function closeGetPerson(id) {
  return function() {
    var params = {};
    var req = opensocial.newDataRequest();
    req.add(req.newFetchPersonRequest(id, params), "person");
    req.send(onPersonGot);
  };
};


function closePrintFriend(list) {
  return function(friend) {
    var item = document.createElement("li");
    var link = document.createElement("a");
    var text = document.createTextNode(friend.getDisplayName());
    list.appendChild(item);
    item.appendChild(link);
    item.appendChild(document.createTextNode(" [" + 
        friend.getId() + "]"));
    link.appendChild(text);
    link.onclick = closeGetPerson(friend.getId());
    link.href = "javascript:void(0);";
  };
};

function gotFriends(data) {
  var friends = data.get("of").getData();
  var list = document.createElement("ul");
  var main = document.getElementById("dom_handle")
  main.innerHTML = "";
  main.appendChild(list);
  friends.each(closePrintFriend(list));
  gadgets.window.adjustHeight();
};

function getFriends() {
  var params = {};
  params[opensocial.DataRequest.PeopleRequestFields.MAX] = 1000;
  var req = opensocial.newDataRequest();
  req.add(req.newFetchPeopleRequest(
      opensocial.DataRequest.Group.OWNER_FRIENDS, params), "of");
  req.send(gotFriends);
};

getFriends();
Note that the example lists the friends of the owner as links.  Clicking on each name will attempt to retrieve that user by ID number. 

fetch_by_ids_2.png

On orkut, if a user doesn't have DAfOS installed, you'll get an "unauthorized" error:

fetch_by_ids_1.png

In your applications, make sure to handle cases like this, since you won't always be able to guarantee that all containers will have the same policies around which user accounts you may directly access.

Updating your apps to use the IdSpec object in OpenSocial 0.8

By
Arne Roomann-Kurrik
on August 22, 2008 5:43 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Lately I've been updating some documentation to use version of 0.8 of the OpenSocial specification.  If you've developed on the 0.7 version of the API, you'll probably be happy to see that not a lot of breaking changes have been introduced in the new version, with one major exception: the IdSpec object.

In the past, when you wanted to specify a single person or a group of people, you would use one of the following:

Single person specifiers (OpenSocial 0.7):
  • opensocial.DataRequest.Person.OWNER
  • opensocial.DataRequest.Person.VIEWER
  • A string representing the OpenSocial ID of a person.
Multiple person specifiers (OpenSocial 0.7):
  • opensocial.DataRequest.Group.OWNER_FRIENDS
  • opensocial.DataRequest.Group.VIEWER_FRIENDS
  • An array of strings, each representing the OpenSocial ID of a person.
In 0.8, the idea of an IdSpec object was introduced.  IdSpec allows you to be much more expressive when specifying groups of people (including friends-of-friends, covered later) but introduces some additional complexity.  Single person specifiers still use the OWNER and VIEWER objects, but these have been moved to the opensocial.IdSpec.PersonId namespace.

To convert your app, update all functions that take a single person identifier to one of the following:
  • opensocial.IdSpec.PersonId.OWNER
  • opensocial.IdSpec.PersonId.VIEWER
  • A string representing the OpenSocial ID of a person.
Note that only the following take a single person modifier:
  • opensocial.DataRequest.newFetchPersonRequest
  • opensocial.DataRequest.newUpdatePersonAppDataRequest
  • opensocial.DataRequest.newRemovePersonAppDataRequest 
The last two only accept the value of opensocial.IdSpec.PersonId.VIEWER, so this is a pretty straightforward change.

Seleting a group of people requires a bit more of a code change, though.  Where you might write something like this in OpenSocial 0.7:

var params = {};
var req = opensocial.newDataRequest();
...
req.add(req.newFetchPeopleRequest(
    opensocial.DataRequest.Group.OWNER_FRIENDS, params);
req.send();
Now you need to create an IdSpec instead:

var params = {};
var idspec = opensocial.newIdSpec({ 
    "userId" : "OWNER", 
    "groupId" : "FRIENDS" 
});
...
req.add(req.newFetchPeopleRequest(
    idspec, params);
req.send();
You can actually create IdSpec equivalents to all of the old person/people identifiers:

IdentifierIdSpec code
OWNER
var idspec = opensocial.newIdSpec({ 
    "userId" : "OWNER",  "groupId" : "SELF" 
});
VIEWER
var idspec = opensocial.newIdSpec({ 
    "userId" : "VIEWER",  "groupId" : "SELF" 
});
OWNER_FRIENDS
var idspec = opensocial.newIdSpec({ 
    "userId" : "OWNER",  "groupId" : "FRIENDS" 
});
VIEWER_FRIENDS
var idspec = opensocial.newIdSpec({ 
    "userId" : "VIEWER",  "groupId" : "FRIENDS" 
});

You can use these for the following functions:
  • opensocial.DataRequest.newFetchActivitiesRequest
  • opensocial.DataRequest.newFetchPeopleRequest
  • opensocial.DataRequest.newFetchPersonAppDataRequest

The IdSpec object exposes some additional functionality like NETWORK_DISTANCE that I'll cover later, but for the time being, this should be enough information to get you to start porting your existing code to 0.8.


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