we want to do something that's relatively common among mobile games. We want to reset our Facebook scoreboard every week. I am surprised to find that - looking around - there is no automatic way to do this.
Is it in the plans to offer this functionality? A probably easier thing on Facebook's end that would work for us is if when we ask for friends scores, we get the date of each score, so we can then filter out the scores that are too old.
Other than that, it seems that we'd have to write a Windows Service or Cron task to call the Facebook every week and do this (or do it manually from Putty or other tool), neither of which seem accceptable for this small task.
Thank you and let us know!
-Brian Hunsaker
Technical Director # DarkTonic Games
There's no way to tell Facebook to wipe your app's Scores automatically, but you only need to make a single API call to wipe all scores:
https://graph.facebook.com/[APP ID]?access_token=[APP ACCESS TOKEN]&method=delete
This is mentioned here:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/score/
The call to delete all the scores from your facebook App is as follows (may have changed):
https://graph.facebook.com/[APP ID]/scores?access_token=[APP TOKEN]&method=delete
it should return true.
Related
As a personal utility, I'm trying to write a short script (preferably in python but essentially I'm looking for the proper REST calls) to get a list of all my friends who I am also following (actually, list all friends and for each one see whether I am also following them).
I tried playing with the API but:
Could not get the pagination right. There seems to be a link to the next results "page", but when I follow this link, the next page is always empty. I do realize this is mainly do to my incompetence with this API, but I just didn't think it would be so difficult.
When I view a specific friend's connection to my user, I can't seem to find this information. This data is obviously stored somewhere, as it is available using standard methods (i.e, open up a friend's facebook page in the browser and look for the "Following" part)
This may sound like a silly question and I did try playing around with the graph explorer, after generating a token with all possible permissions, but I did not get far.
Please help me make my life a little easier by not having to resort to the manual way of opening up every single friend page, this sounds exhausting.
PS: This may sound like a personal question and not very professional, but as I was struggling with this task, I though it may be of use to other individuals looking for this functionality
Thanks!
Listing all friends isn't possible with v2.0 API. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/upgrading/
As long as you have an application that can still run v1.0 API calls then you can do an FQL call
SELECT is_following, target_id FROM connection WHERE source_id=me() AND target_id IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1=me())
I made a game for Facebook canvas in unity, Now i want to sell items in my game with Facebook payment, The problem is i am not a good programmer and Facebook documentations are very hard to understand, so i need some simple steps to integrate payment to my game,
i registered Facebook payment company,
Now how to define product in my unity codes?
How to prompt dialog box?
what to write in callback URL in php?
please make it simple and clear for me
thanks
I think you need to investigate a bit more on how to achieve this, since there is a lot of information available. I'll try to clear some doubts of yours:
To define products for your game, you need to define an Open Graph Object, and upload it to a server (can be your own, or dropbox). Here is a guide from my blog, where I teach how to upload and host OG Objects for achievements, steps are similar.
The in-game code to use in Unity is the method Pay (FB.Canvas.Pay), which receives the url of your hosted OG Object, and some other parameters, and it prompts the user with the appropiate interface to pay (Keep in mind this only works when the game is inside the facebook canvas)
I Hope this starts to guide you on how to approach the paymet system!
I'll answer the questions in the comment here:
No, you don't need the Javascript SDK anymore. Just need to have the Unity SDK in your game.
I haven't found much information on the callback, but since I don't really use it, I just used this code inside a PHP script to just make it work:
$hub_mode = $_GET['hub_mode'];
$hub_challenge = $_GET['hub_challenge'];
$hub_verify_token = $_GET['hub_verify_token'];
if ($hub_verify_token =='YourToken')
{
echo $hub_challenge;
}
I'm creating a django website with Apache2 as the server. I need a way to determine the number of unique visitors to my website (specifically to every page in particular) in a full proof way. Unfortunately users will have high incentives to try to "game" the tracking systems so I'm trying to make it full proof.
Is there any way of doing this?
Currently I'm trying to use IP & Cookies to determine unique visitors, but this system can be easily fooled with a headless browser.
Unless it's necessary that the data be integrated into your Django database, I'd strongly recommend "outsourcing" your traffic to another provider. I'm very happy with Google Analytics.
Failing that, there's really little you can do to keep someone from gaming the system. You could limit based on IP address but then of course you run into the problem that often many unique visitors share IPs (say, via a university, organization, or work site). Cookies are very easy to clear out, so if you go that route then it's very easy to game.
One thing that's harder to get rid of is files stored in the appcache, so one possible solution that would work on modern browsers is to store a file in the appcache. You'd count the first time it was loaded in as the unique visit, and after that since it's cached they don't get counted again.
Of course, since you presumably need this to be backwards compatible then of course it leaves it open to exactly the sorts of tools which are most likely to be used for gaming the system, such as curl.
You can certainly block non-browserlike user agents, which makes it slightly more difficult if some gamers don't know about spoofing browser agent strings (which most will quickly learn).
Really, the best solution might be -- what is the outcome from a visit to a page? If it is, for example, selling a product, then don't award people who have the most page views; award the people whose hits generate the most sales. Or whatever time-consuming action someone might take at the page.
Possible solution:
If you're willing to ignore people with JavaScript disabled, you could choose to count only people who access the page and then stay on that page for a given window of time (say, 1 minute). After a given period of time, do an Ajax request back to the server. So if they tried to game by changing their cookie and loading multiple tabs at once, it wouldn't work because they'd need to have the same cookie in order to register that they'd been on that page long enough. I actually think this might work; I can't honestly see a way to game that. Basically on the server side you store a dictionary called stay_until in request.session with keys for each unique page and after 1 minute or so you run an Ajax call back to the server. If the value for stay_until[page_id] is less than or equal to the current time, then they're an active user, otherwise they're not. This means that it will take someone at least 20 minutes to generate 20 unique visitors, and so long as you make the payoff worth less than the time consumed that will be a strong disincentive.
I'd even make it more explicit: on the bottom of the page in a noscript tag, put "Your access was not counted. Turn on JavaScript to be counted" with a page that lays out the tracking process.
As HTML Requests are stateless and you have no control over the users behavior on his clientside, there is no bulletproof way.
The only way you're going to be able to track "unique" visitors in a fool-proof way is to make it contingent on some controlled factor such as a login. Anything else can and will fail to be completely accurate.
We were having a beer talk and have something to clear out.
Is the following conclusion correct:
When I put a facebook-like-button-box on my page, does facebook know
every time I'm on that page, even if i'm not logged in.
basically the same as google analytics
if this nis correct, it should be possible to sandbox, the like-button until someone will use it. Then facebook gets only informations when the user actively confirms that.
cheers endo
No, they can't directly track you if you are not logged in and you view an external "like" button. They can, however, set a tracking cookie that identifies you when you sign in, which would allow them to match the tracking data in the current session to you.
One of Facebook's primary revenue streams comes from the analysis and sale of market trend information. They can analyse the likes and comment keywords of certain user clusters (e.g. middle-aged American females, teenagers in college, etc) and use these to produce statistics about market patterns and trends. They can also use keyword analysis to tell a company how many people are talking about something, e.g. "how many people have mentioned my latest blockbuster film?"
You could simply move the image and JavaScript code away from the Facebook servers and host it locally to avoid them from tracking your users.
In pre-emption of the "FACEBOOK = EVIL" arguments:
In the end, though, is it really a big issue? Some people see Facebook as this massive life-infringing uncaring supercorporation, but in reality they're just making a buck through completely anonymous statistics. No human being (or sentient robot) views your preferences, browser tracking data, or personal information. Everything is anonymised and turned into a bunch of numbers relating to a group. Sure, they could screw everyone over and be evil, but why bother when you already make that much money legitimately?
Go bounty!
This question has earned me a tumbleweed badge (7 views in 7 days!), which is somehow a strong confirmation that Navision has a very limited market share, which - I suspect - should be a confirmation Navision is neither all that great piece of software...
But hey... that's what we got as a back-end, so I am ready to fight with this. :-O
If there is some daring navision developer who is able to shed light onto this... the bounty is there for you! :)
Original Post
I have recently implemented a rather complex e-commerce system that interacts with a legacy back-end based on Navision 5. So far the exchange of data between the two platform has happened via XML files, but this method is quite clumsy and very much prone to mishaps.
Our needs are:
To expose certain elements of the business logic of each platform to the other one (for example: "what's the total amount ever purchased by this customer?", "what are the products currently on offer?", "how many new customers have registered on the website?", etc...).
To have mechanisms of feed-back / validation for the various transactions (for example: "Here's the a new order from customer X" ... "Ok, got it, the order will now start to be processed" ... "Ok, copy that, bye!").
If possible, avoid playing around with files, but keeping all of this happening in terms of calls/ports/services...
The most natural way I could think of would be to integrate the two systems via webservice, but Navision 5 does not support this natively. So I did my "due diligence" and found a few things on MSDN including this article and this other one.
According to these articles it should not be that difficult to create a webservice on Navision 5, but when I suggested this solution to the team in charge of the legacy system, they told us that it is "pure theory" and they do not know of anybody who ever implemented it.
I have no reason to doubt their word, but mileage can vary... and I thought that maybe in the SO community there are professionals from other countries who actually implemented something similar and are available to share their experience.
So, my question is two-folded:
Is there anybody who has tried this at home and would be available to share a bit on what have been the greatest difficulties, if the final result is reliable, if they think the outcome is worth the effort, etc... ?
Is there anybody who faced a similar problem but solved it with a different approach and that would be available to present their solution ("I never did it myself, but if I had to do it I would do it like this..." type of answers are also welcome)?
Thank you in advance for your time! :)
I too will chime in with a not-too helpful answer about Nav 6 :)
I've just completed a project using Nav 6. Suprisingly, the webservices are VERY easy to expose and consume. It's really a trivial matter to go find a object in the webservices interface and tick a box to tell it to expose itself.
Unsuprisingly, the webservices don't work as you'd expect, you have to often use some trial-and error to get objects and properties to persist, as it's really touchy as to the sequence of events you use to save and object. And each object seems to work slightly differently. eg: To create a customer, I eventually found out that you have to create and save a blank customer, massage this new record with a codeunit, then fetch the record and then write the customer's attributes and save again. I expected to just create a new customer(), set the attributes and save in one quick swoop.
I guess you're not too keen on upgrading to Nav6, but off the top of my head, Here is how you could simulate web services:
Sharepoint can already consume and expose webservices, so that tier isn't a problem.
Nav 5 doesn't have them 'naturally', but you could cook up your own program that acts as a webservice 'broker' - you're already getting info into and out of nav, via mostly XML. You could build this broker to take input as the xml files and massage them to use in a webservice call. You could even forgo the XML and write and read directly from the Db, as all the Nav info is stored there anyway. So here's what I'm thinking:
NAV <-> SQL SERVER <-> New 'broker' webservice <-> Sharepoint
Or if you already have the NAV API down pat and want to resuse your XML:
NAV <-> XML files <-> New 'broker' webservice <-> Sharepoint
If you are using XML and use filewatchers, the latency shouldn't be too bad, usually filewatchers pick up on a drop or change in milliseconds.
Hmm, but I'm thinking you are probably supposed to use BizTalk for stuff like this:
NAV <-> BizTalk <-> Sharepoint
But I don't know how easy it would be to set up BizTalk to communicate with Nav. I'll bet that it's pretty straighforward to get comms working, but this is speculation.
In any case, I don't know how helpful this post is, but maybe it gives you a few ideas to go with.
Cheers,
Lance
Where I work, we were able to use one of the web services from NAV 6 to integrate with SharePoint, so you can look up a customer or record and show it in a web part in SharePoint. I know your question is about NAV 5 in particular, but I have only seen this working on NAV 6. And I wasn't the developer who worked on this, so I don't have any more specifics I'm afraid.
Did you try asking on mibuso.com? They're much more Navision-focused.
When you say expose business logic, does this include executing AL code (e.g. a CodeUnit)? If you only need to perform queries against the database you could use NODBC & System.Data.Odbc or the CFront .NET API. Either of these can easily be wrapped using a .NET web service, and both support the native NAV database. To pass messages back you would still need to use COM, as described in the first article you mention.
Any of the above are entirely possible, and relatively easy depending on your proficiency in .NET, COM and NAV.
The second article you linked to describes using the NAS. I'm no expert on this, but I think this might require a special license granule. Before spending time implementing anything its worth checking whether your license includes the NAS, CFront or NODBC.
You can actually do a "technical upgrade" of NAV 5 to NAV 2009 and then use the native webservices. Meaning replacing the exe-files and the entire application (but not the objects, which will still be version 5), and a couple of other tricks. But it works, and thus you have 2009-webservice-functionality on your NAV 5 :-)
For the benefit of anyone googling this, if you're still on Navision 6 with the native database, a good way of connecting it is via the windows message queue.
You can write your own web service that puts XML requests into the queue and then wait for the reply to pop up. On the Navision side, you have one clients that pulls the queue and puts answers into the reply queue. There's a special non-GUI client called NAS for that.
I've been using this approach for 15 years to connect booking engines to out Navision back end. It works very well and has the advantage that you can peek at requests before they reach Navision, so you can protect your back end from too many or faulty requests.
The only problem with this approach is that the COMMIT command within Navision is super expensive. It's difficult to serve high volumes of requests. As soon as the back end needs committing, you are down to just a few requests per second. This may be fine for low volume.
For high volume you need to implement caching or getting some of the business logic out. For me it was getting hit by price comparison websites, so here the solution is serve those from web services written in Python and only pass on the requests if someone buys something...