I'm working on a Google Calendar Gadget and need to load data for the user from a remote server. It's simple stuff, like favorite color, but I need the user's ID. Using makeRequest works in general, but I need to send the account name, or a hash of it, or any sort of identifier to my server so it gets the right data. What's the easiest way to get that info? Currently it asks the user via HTML form, every single time it loads, which is pretty lame.
I've been looking at OAuth stuff, trying examples, and nothing works... I got an OAuth client key but don't know how/where to use it (or if I do use it with a Gadget). I found the Calendar feed/scope URI but I'm not really sure if that's correct to just get a user identifier, maybe I should use accounts. Half the examples are for OAuth 1.0...it's really frustrating.
Does anyone know a way to do this, or a good example/tutorial that explains how, for a Gadget? I think Gadgets are different since they run on Google's servers...but don't really know how this makes them different in this context.
See the answer to this: osapi.people.get() returns 404 in google calendar sidebar gadget. Then associate the google user ID with your internal ID, if different.
Related
Our customer wants to see a report of all their current users' last login dates, but I couldn't find a way to get that information from the current API:
http://docs.valence.desire2learn.com/res/user.html
It's a little frustrating, because it's so easy to get this data in the UI itself:
Is there any way we can get that data through the API? Thanks!
Currently, there is no way to get this information via an API call; however, you are not the first person to inquire about this, and I suspect it's on D2L's list of improvement items for their developer platform.
I'm currently writing a shop-related site that has it's own community in different social networks. While posting to VKontakte and Facebook is less of an issue (I can understand the concept of "group", and VK actually has an option to write posts using the group's name), Twitter is more troublesome.
Two questions:
Is there even such a thing as "groups" in Twitter? The closest I have seen is lists and timelines, but neither appears to solve my issue.
I cannot give the operator access to the twitter account. VK has a specific option when posting in a group to use that group's name as poster name. How does this work in Twitter?
I need something akin to what lamoda has set up. (It appears to be a user, and every post is labeled as written by that user, however I doubt they give their ops access to the actual twitter account).
P.S.: I'm already done with getting past OAuth and using REST to actually post, thus no code provided. I'm just having trouble with the statuses/update.json call, if that's what I should actually be using.
Talk about simple solutions to simple problems.
It appears I have been overcomplicating. There are no groups in twitter, or even comments at that. You can only post to your own feed or re-post from somebody else's.
Posting to someone's feed (a shop account's, say) is simple enough using that account's pre-generated access token which can be stored in the configs.
While https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2Login is very descriptive, I cannot seem to wrap my head around how to translate into a Google Apps Script.
The ultimate goal is to have the user click a link, authorize access to their userinfo. I will then use their email address or userId to assign the appropriate spreadsheet to other Google Apps Scripts UIs.
I am certain that some sample code would get me on my way.
Is it even possible?
Can a linked be utilized to make this happen? http://support.google.com/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1224166&topic=1224152&ctx=topic
The trouble is that when you publish your script as a service, it executes under your ID. All the authorization has to be done in the script editor. So, when a third person clicks a button or link or whatever, the script runs under your user ID and all you get back is your own user id.
In short, the answer is no. Sad, but true :(
Check out the OAuth code on the Google Code site. There are some great examples along with the client (and server) code in several different programming languages. Follow along with the samples on how to get the tokens needed.
I have a couple outstanding questions mainly reguarding twitter and facebook
In the FacebookGraph class there are properties such as Id,name,etc. I am wondering how do I add to this list? Like what happens if I want a users hometown? I tried to add a property called hometown but it always is null.
What should I store their id(1418) or the whole url(http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1418) for lookup later in my db to grab their data and to see if they have an account with my site?
Is it actually good to use this id as it seems like it is common knowledge. Can't someone just find the profile id or whatever and do a fake request on my site?
how do you setup dotnetopenauth to deal with the case when a user goes to facebook and deletes access to my website. I know you can send a deauthorization code to your site and then delete their account but I don't know how to do that through dotnetopenauth
Twitter
Is it possible to do number 4 with twitter?
Ajax
Is it possible to make the openid stuff ajax? I don't see a sample anywhere in the dotnetopenauth samples.
I'm no pro at Facebook. But the FacebookGraph class is in the ApplicationBlock, which ships as source and is fully intended for you to customize or extend within your own application. Hopefully people more familiar with Facebook in particular, or the Facebook docs, can help you with those questions.
Since Facebook is not OpenID, what you store whether ID # or the whole URL, is less critical. People should not be able to just craft requests to log in as others because your site should be verifying signatures, etc. If you're using DotNetOpenAuth appropriately this is probably being done automatically for you. But without seeing your code it can't be said for sure.
Assume the id is common knowledge. It certainly isn't a long random number so anyone can guess it. The ID must be accompanied by a signature that verifies that Facebook sent the ID, just now, for you.
I suspect the deauthorization code isn't going to be relevant to DotNetOpenAuth -- that's probably just some URL that you respond to. But again, I haven't read the FB docs on this.
Here's the real answer I can give you. Yes, OpenID works with AJAX reasonably well. You can see some samples of this at nerddinner.com or a sample of a blog post comment system. The most complete AJAX demonstration for standard login may be in the web forms or MVC project templates available on the Visual Studio Gallery.
Recently search engines have been able to page dynamic content on social networking sites. I would like to understand how this is done. Are there static pages created by a site like Facebook that update semi frequently. Does Google attempt to store every possible user name?
As I understand it, a page like www.facebook.com/username, is not an actual file stored on disk but is shorthand for a query like: select username from users and display the information on the page. How does Google know about every user, this gets even more complicated when things like tweets are involved.
EDIT: I guess I didn't really ask what I wanted to know about. Do I need to be as big as twitter or facebook in order for google to make special ways to crawl my site? Will google automatically find my users profiles if I allow anyone to view them? If not what do I have to do to make that work?
In the case of tweets in particular, Google isn't 'crawling' for them in the traditional sense; they've integrated with Twitter to provide the search results in real-time.
In the more general case of your question, dynamic content is not new to Facebook or Twitter, though it may seem to be. Google crawls a URL; the URL provides HTML data; Google indexes it. Whether it's a dynamic query that's rendering the page, or whether it's a cache of static HTML, makes little difference to the indexing process in theory. In practice, there's a lot more to it (see Michael B's comment below.)
And see Vartec's succinct post on how Google might find all those public Facebook profiles without actually logging in and poking around FB.
OK, that was vastly oversimplified, but let's see what else people have to say..
As far as I know Google isn't able to read and store the actual contents of profiles, because the Google bot doesn't have a Facebook account, and it would be a huge privacy breach.
The bot works by hitting facebook.com and then following every link it can find. Whatever content it sees on the page it hits, it stores. So even if it follows a dynamic url like www.facebook.com/username, it will just remember whatever it saw when it went there. Hopefully in that particular case, it isn't all the private data of said user.
Additionally, facebook can and does provide special instructions that search bots can follow, so that google results don't include a bunch of login pages.
profiles can be linked from outside;
site may provide sitemap