Question

I need to develop a pretty complicated Flash site based on the Facebook API, and if there’s a way I can develop locally rather than having to upload it all the time I would be forever grateful.

I saw a post mentioning setting something to localhost but they never specified what exactly ( is it possible to use facebook API locally? )

Much appreciated.

Answer 1

Encapsulation is your friend in this case. When I use external / 3rd party APIs, I like to make a wrapper class of my own for the data. Let’s say you only care about ‘fbID’ and ‘userName’. Make a class of your own to hold this data once it is retrieved (private vars with getters, and 1 or more setters). Some skeleton code:

class MyUserClass{
  //declare vars here (_fbID, _userName)
  public function setData(userID:String, userName:String):void{
    //set the values here.
  }
  //getters here (get fbID, get userName)
}

You can use 2 setter functions if you want to, but the point is that you will be able to call them with any data you want. When your entire application fetches this info from your class, and not the api directly you can work offline. When in offline mode, you can plug in some compatible ‘fake’ data to see it work.

Now you need to take this to the next level by making a wrapper type for every call you make to facebook. What I mean by this is that since you know what to expect from fb, you can pretend you actually got it, and proceed from there. Asking for a list of friend IDs? make a fake list that is reasonable, and have your application use it. Better still, generate as many fake offline users as you want, and make your server calls delay a random ‘lag’ time before returning the fake data to the event listener. This will also help test against possible race conditions.

One way to do this is by creating and extending a class to execute the api calls. Enjoy.

import flash.events.EventDispatcher;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.events.TimerEvent;
import flash.utils.Timer;
class MyApiCaller extends EventDispatcher{
    //set up vars to hold call result data
    protected var _someData:String;
    //make sure to declare some event types for the callbacks
    public static const SERVERCALL1_COMPLETE:String = "servercall1_complete";
    function MyApiCaller(){
        //init things....
    }
    public function doServerCall1(...args:*):void {
        //create the ulrLoader etc...
        //set up event listener to onServerCall1Complete
    }
    public function onServerCall1Complete(event:Event):void {
        //parse results, save to vars
        //fire event to notify the caller
        dispatchEvent(new Event(SERVERCALL1_COMPLETE));
    }
    //getter to be used when the waiting object gets the SERVERCALL1_COMPLETE event
    public function get someData():String {return _someData;}
}


class MyFakeApiCaller extends MyApiCaller{
    //set up any additional types (random user data etc..) that would not be found in the base class
    //no need to redeclare the event types
    function MyFakeApiCaller(){
        //init things....
    }
    override public function doServerCall1(...args:*):void {
        //wait a random amount of time via Timer, set up event listener to onServerCall1Complete
    }
    override public function onServerCall1Complete(event:Event):void {
        //event is a TimerEvent in this case        
        //generate data / choose random data
        //save to vars: _someData = ...
        //fire event to notify the caller
        dispatchEvent(new Event(MyApiCaller.SERVERCALL1_COMPLETE));
    }
    //getter from base class will be used as usual
}