It feels like an eternity since it was announced but iOS 6 is finally available to
the masses, and we can now talk about the all the (few) new goodies that it
contains.
Apple included the Social Framework in iOS 6 as an abstraction layer for accessing the various social services that are now included with iOS. The key feature here is that you never have to deal with the Facebook SDK again if you wish...
So let's explore how you can use the new Social framework classes to replace REST API access functionality that is provided via the Official Facebook SDK
Apple included the Social Framework in iOS 6 as an abstraction layer for accessing the various social services that are now included with iOS. The key feature here is that you never have to deal with the Facebook SDK again if you wish...
So let's explore how you can use the new Social framework classes to replace REST API access functionality that is provided via the Official Facebook SDK
TL;DR; Sample code
Create an ACAccountStore
According to Apple's developer documentation the ACAccountStore
[ACAccountStore] provides an interface for accessing, manipulating, and storing accounts. To create and retrieve accounts from the Accounts database, you must create an ACAccountStore object. Each ACAccount object belongs to a single ACAccountStore object.
A simple alloc && init sent to ACAccountStore will suffice. Perhaps
the easiest thing you'll do this week.
Get the Facebook ACAccountType
The 2nd easiest thing you'll do this week
Request access to currently logged in Facebook User
Before the callback block is called the User will be presented with a UI to confirm
that they want your app to have permission to access this API. In the event that
initial permission has been revoked, or disabled you will be given a negative boolean
value.
Select an authenticated ACAccount
Your block will need to reference your ACAccountStore instance in order to
see which accounts you have access to. To actually access the accounts you need to
call the accountsWithAccountType: method which returns a NSArray of
ACAccount objects. Where the type argument is account type we got in the
previous section.
Apple has designed the ACAccountStore class to support multiple authorised user accounts. While iOS 6 only supports a single Facebook account, it does support multiple Twitter accounts. So while it is safe to assume that first (and only entry) in this collection is the ACAccount you want to use, the same cannot be said when you are working with Twitter accounts. Ideally you would want to present a 'picker' UI to the end user.
Apple has designed the ACAccountStore class to support multiple authorised user accounts. While iOS 6 only supports a single Facebook account, it does support multiple Twitter accounts. So while it is safe to assume that first (and only entry) in this collection is the ACAccount you want to use, the same cannot be said when you are working with Twitter accounts. Ideally you would want to present a 'picker' UI to the end user.
Construct a SLRequest
SLRequest is the Social frameworks NSURL request abstraction to enable
it to support request signing, and token passing, features used by Twitter and
Facebook. The SLRequest class also has a convenience method for dispatching
this request.
If you are a fan of request queuing, and application wide request management there is
also the option to extract a prepared NSURLRequest object with you can then
pass to something like an AFNetworking request operation (See below).
That's it! If you weren't able to string the process together in your head magically, you can view the entire gist. Thanks for reading!
