I am trying to implement simple checkin functionality in a Facebook centric, location based WP7 application I am currently developing. I have managed to search and return a list of possible checkins within a given radius and checkin to one. I am now trying to add a ‘custom’ checkin in case none of the available options are of interest to the user. Could you please advise as to how that can be done? I am assuming it will be something along the lines of ‘create location and return newly created ID’ but I do not know how one can create a location.
Thank you in advance.
In order to create a Place on Facebook it must either be a Facebook Page or an Open Graph Object. You obviously can not create Facebook Pages via the Graph API, but you can however create Open Graph Objects.
Basically what you’d do here is allow your user to check in to a place, if this place is new then you create it in your own database on your servers, and you’d have an end-point that loaded the correct Open Graph data for that Place on your web servers. You’d then publish the check-in to Facebook for the user, and point it at the web end-point you created. This will cause Facebook to look up your graph data, create a graph object, and save the user’s check-in. If the place they check in to already exists, then instead of passing a new web end-point, you’d pass either the existing end-point or the unique place id that Facebook assigned that place.
You can read more about each of the technologies you need to use on the Facebook developer documentation. Open Graph Protocol Check-ins, and Graph API Object Selection (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/#reading)