Question

I am adding the ability for a user to link their foursquare account with their account on my website. Foursquare’s oauth account authorization takes the user to foursquare’s website, and after authorizing my website it redirects the user back to a url.

I want to avoid breaking the user’s context on my website when they decide to add foursquare functionality to their account, so I’m planning on doing foursquare’s account authorization in a new window using

var foursquare_popup = window.open("foursquare_url_to_authenticate_user");

and redirecting the popup to a static success page once the authorization has been completed.

I’ve seen oauth popups done in a couple places like Wired’s tweet button.

Is this a good way to handle oauth with things like twitter/facebook/foursquare?

Answer 1

You can specify display=webpopup if you want to use a pop-up window (see https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/auth#display).

Also, you can specify additional parameters in your callback URL, which will be preserved by the oauth flow. So if you passed “&state=settings/accounts” or something as parameter of your redirect_uri, you can parse it out upon success and resume your session with the user appropriately.