We’re happy to announce that we have added a new Ruby on Rails SDK for GameStamper. The SDK is based on the original Facebook project fb_graph by nov mattake (github.com/nov/fb_graph) and is a direct descendent of the contributions of rockycaamano (github.com/rockycaamano/gs_graph).
This brings our GameStamper SDK total up to 5, all of which work on GameStamper, GoPlay, and other publisher sites seamlessly.
In our continued efforts to make our Graph API easy to use, we have added a field/connection picker to our API Explorer.
As you can see, the left side of the explorer now contains a more visual representation of your query. A small “+” symbol appears next to every part of the graph that contains more fields and connections.
We will soon include “modifiers” such as limit in the picker as well.
In our continued efforts to easily expose data in the graph, and keep pace with the Facebook Graph, we have released Field Expansion. Through Field Expansion, many previously cumbersome queries to the graph can now be simplified into one query that returns only the subset of data that developers need. For example, you can now retrieve the id, name, and birthday of everyone who commented on a particular photo with the following query:
https://graph.gamestamper.com/<photo_id>/comments?fields=from.fields(id, name, birthday)Prior to field expansion, one query would retrieve the list of comments (which included user ids), then another query would retrieve the details for each user. Still to come is full support for Field Expansion in the Graph Explorer.
For graph requests, we’ve always supported the ?ids=id1,id2 format, but a few months back we started to support JSON format as well.
Now, if it’s easier for you, you can send graph requests as ?ids=[‘id1’,’id2] (query string encoded of course).
We recently published our Roadmap to keep you informed of the changes coming to the GameStamper platform. We understand that your games are typically maintained across multiple gaming networks, so we:
When possible and appropriate, you will be able to enable/disable the changes for your game before the date that it goes live for everyone. For example, on May 2nd, 2012, the <offline_access> permission will be removed. We have added some documentation on how to handle this. We have also create a Migration setting for this change, which lets you try your game with offline_access enabled and disabled. Just visit your Game Dashboard and click on the “Migrations” tab to enable/disable. After May 2nd, offline_access will be remove for everyone, and the Migration for it will disappear as well.
Though we’ve supported GraphAPI Batch Requests since launch, we haven’t had any official documentation on it until now. As you would expect, batch requests on the GameStamper GraphAPI work the same way that they do on the Facebook Graph to ensure quick and painless integrations of existing Facebook Games.
How does it work?
Issue a request to http://www.gamestamper.com with a valid access_token and a batch. Batch is the JSON string of an array of logical graph requests. Each item in the batch requires a method and relative_url, while headers (corresponding to HTTP headers) and body (for POST and PUT requests) are optional.
Example:
Let’s batch two common requests, /me and /me/friends?limit=50.
curl \
-F 'access_token=...' \
-F 'batch=[ \
{"method": "GET", "relative_url": "me"}, \
{"method": "GET", "relative_url": "me/friends?limit=50"} \
]'\
https://graph.gamestamper.comWhich returns:
[
{ "code": 200,
"headers":[
{ "name": "Content-Type",
"value": "text/javascript; charset=UTF-8"
}
],
"body": "{\"id\":\"...\"}"
},
{ "code": 200,
"headers":[
{ "name":"Content-Type",
"value":"text/javascript; charset=UTF-8"
}
],
"body":"{\"data\": [{...}]}
}
]Thanks to some feedback from the developers at Mall World, we’ve added a new canvas parameter of gsplatform, which contains the name of the platform that your game is currently being played on. For example, it will contain ‘GameStamper’ and ‘GoPlay’ on the www.gamestamper.com and www.goplay.com. This might be useful if your game has custom messaging such as “Send a gift to your GoPlay friends.”
You can read more about our gsplatform parameter, and all the canvas parameters that we pass to your game.
While we don’t fully support the Legacy REST API because Facebook is deprecating it, the reality is that many apps still use the REST API endpoints. So, in order to make the process of migrating an existing FB App over to the GameStamper platform as easy as possible, we support a few of the most commonly used REST API endpoints.
If your app is using other Legacy REST API endpoints that we don’t yet expose, be sure to let us know and we’ll try to get it in as soon as possible.
Until now, the only place to test any Feed Posts created with the Feed Dialog or via the GraphAPI was on Facebook itself, which was certainly not ideal. To help make developers’ lives easier, we created the Feed page, where developers can view the feed posts that they posted to their own wall, or posts that were directed at them.
A link to the Feed page, located at http://www.gamestamper.com/feed, can be found in the user drop-down:
For a quick review of how to post things into the feed, check out our Feed Dialog sample.
You may have noticed that FB is exposing a new ‘namespace’ property on their apps, which is a copy of the canvas_page property. We’ve followed suit to ensure that your games will still work as expected across both platforms. Until 2/1/2012, both namespace and canvas_page will work, after which, canvas_page will disappear.
When editing your game, you’ll notice the update on the Integration tab:
When making graph calls for Applications, both properties will be returned, both with the same value as follows:
https://graph.gamestamper.com/acriah0cngroir7yh7jtcrzhc6?fields=namespace,canvas_name
returns:
{
"namespace":"phpfbtutorial",
"canvas_name":"phpfbtutorial",
"id":"acriah0cngroir7yh7jtcrzhc6"
}
