I am working on a page tab application and am having an issue with navigation. My application, written in MVC3, is displaying and authenticating just fine as a page tab. When I click on my tab, my app receives a POST with the signed_request object as expected.
My question is, how can I support links to other pages in my application? When a user clicks on a link, I want an action to be called in my application and to not leave the Facebook iframe. In addition, I need the signed_request to be passed along so I have a user context.
At first, I thought this was not supported and that all page tab applications had to be written as Single Page Applications. However, I found examples that do exactly what I am looking for.
Click on an image:
https://www.facebook.com/Sephora/app_305927716147259
And:
How are these apps handling page navigation within the iframe?
The performance of clicking on an image seems to be pretty bad. What are they doing behind the scenes and is there a more direct way of handling navigation?
I will also need to handle POSTs.
Thank you.
Well, that’s what normal HTML links do – so no extra effort required at this point 🙂
You could pass it as a GET parameter with every link – but this way the user can easily “see” it, and it might also get transfered to external servers (if any external resources are embedded within your page) via the HTTP referrer.
The better solution IMHO is store the signed request server-side in your session (parsed already, if you like), so that you have access to it on the following pages of your app.