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Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

July 5, 2012

Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

By Noorin Ladhani

Since last Wednesday's update, we launched an API that allows you to get the user's preferred currency along with the conversion rate to Credits.

Streamline review of your Open Graph actions and objects

This week we published a new guide titled Creating Usage Instructions. When you submit your Open Graph actions and objects for review, you must include usage instructions. This guide outlines how to create clear instructions so that we can quickly review your submissions.

Javascript SDK cleanup

We are continuing to reduce the number of methods exposed by the global FB object in the Javascript SDK and are now logging a warning to the console whenever a non-documented method is used. At a later time, these will all be stubbed with empty functions before finally being removed entirely from the FB object. For the list of publicly available methods, please see the Javascript SDK documentation.

Breaking changes effective today

As announced in April per our 90-day breaking change policy, ten breaking changes are going into effect today:

  1. Event GETs from Graph API/FQL will require an access token
  2. Removing display=wap dialogs
  3. Removing some event FQL object fields
  4. Coordinate-less tags
  5. Removing bookmark.add and profile.addtab dialogs
  6. Moving "type" property into "metadata" array
  7. Removal of FBML
  8. Updating Page "hours" property
  9. Batch API exception format
  10. Removing timezone from event times

For the full details on all these changes, please check out the Developer Roadmap.

October 2012 breaking changes (90-day notice)

The following changes will go into effect on October 3rd, 2012:

Built-in like/follow action required
We will stop allowing the use of Custom Open Graph "like" and "follow" actions now that there are built-in "like" and built-in "follow" actions. Please convert any custom "like" or "follow" actions you may have created to instead use the built-in "like" or "follow" actions.

Removing Bookmark URL - Originally scheduled for December 1, 2011
As mentioned on the blog, this optional field was originally created to help developers track user referrals from app bookmarks. We now pass a ref parameter to let you know that the user is coming from a bookmark (i.e. ref=bookmarks). As such, we will remove the "Bookmark URL" field from the apps settings.

The following change can be enabled/disabled using the "Remove offline_access" migration until October 3rd when it will go into effect permanently for everyone:

offline_access permission removal
The offline_accesspermission is deprecated and will be removed October 3rd, 2012 (originally scheduled for July 5th). Please see the Removal of offline_access Permission doc for more details.

The following changes can all be enabled/disabled using the "October 2012 Breaking Changes" migration (will be available for use by July 18th) until October 3rd when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Removing Live Stream plugin
The Live Stream plugin has been deprecated and will render the Comments Box plugin in its place. While it offers similar functionality, there are a few functional differences. Please see the Live Stream plugin documentation for more info.

Summary field being replaced by description field
Because the two fields were somewhat redundant, we will be removing the "Summary" field (found in the "Auth Dialog" section of an app's settings) and instead using the "Description" field (found in the "Advanced" section of an app's settings) in places where "Summary" was previously used.

Removing position field for photos
The position field in both the photo FQL table as well as the Photo Graph API object will start returning 0 for all photos. The photos connection on an Album object in the Graph API will continue to return photos in the order they appear in the album. FQL queries on the photo table that have a WHERE clause containing the aid or album_object_id columns will return in the correct order as well without needing an ORDER BY position clause.

/picture connection will return a dictionary when a callback is specified
We will start returning a dictionary containing the fields url, height, width, and is_silhouette when accessing the /picture connection for an object and specifying a callback property. Currently we just return the picture URL as a string.

Weekly Stats

The following stats are for activity between Wednesday, June 27th and Wednesday, July 4th.

Bugs activity

  • 217 bugs were reported
  • 34 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
  • 8 bugs were by design
  • 17 bugs were fixed
  • 66 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com

  • 440 questions asked
  • 326 questions with a score of 0 or greater
  • 115 answered, 35% answered rate
  • 182 replied, 56% reply rate

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