Our application behaves fairly differently when a Facebook account is linked to it. In the web browser, the linking process involves calling FB.login and requesting minimal privileges. This gives the browser a Facebook user ID and a temporary access token, which are then validated server-side to make sure that the access token actually works for the specified user ID.
What I’d like to do is to perform automated testing of the application behaviour with and without a Facebook account linked to it. By far the easiest way of doing it would be to supply credentials to a real Facebook app to the test system, and let it perform real association/disassociation.
A significantly trickier approach would involve making our system believe a Facebook account is linked when it really isn’t. This is undesirable for several reasons:
- potential for confusion between a real and a fake Facebook association
- possibly “leaky” tests, whereby something works for a fake but not a real Facebook association
- a significant amount of extra coding
Does Facebook cater for this type of scenario in any way whatsoever? Like allowing me to register a test account whose login/password can be made semi-public within our company? Or is a fake association the only viable approach?
In other words, is there a Facebook API that I could execute outside of a browser, which does the same thing as FB.login, except that it’s given login/password as arguments and succeeds or fails with zero user interaction?
facebook provides an API that can be used to generate test users (and a corresponding access token) via a simple URL request. Read the following documentation for more info:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/
Hopefully this will be useful in solving your problem.