Facebook authentication with new 'Facebook SDK for iOS' vs. old 'Facebook iPhone SDK'

Question

I'm working on integrating Facebook with my iPhone/iOS application and I want to know if I'm understanding the nature of the login procedure correctly.

With the old Facebook SDK ('Facebook iPhone SDK'), when we needed to request authentication permission from a user a UIWebView would be displayed with a login prompt. With the new SDK ('Facebook SDK for iOS'), the SDK uses Apple's fast-app-switching feature to temporarily place the app in background mode and then load the iOS Facebook app or Safari to authenticate. Is this basically the gist of it?

I've experimented with authenticating my app via the new SDK's technique and due to the nature of my app, it just can't support backgrounding. Does this mean I have to use the old SDK to launch a UIWebView-based authentication? I think this implementation is a lot cleaner anyway. Will I run into any major disadvantages from doing this?

Answer 1

Check out this question and my answer: Iphone facebook connect example calls safari. I don't want to use safari

You can make it use the UIWebView always. Facebook is trying to make it so the user only has to log in once per device (through either the Facebook app or in Safari) but I didn't like this flow (especially on the iPad). Though I'd rather not muck around with the Facebook code, I did find commenting out a few lines to be a quick way of getting the old behavior back.

Answer 2

I don't believe this is the case.

The Facebook SDK that I'm aware of, available at https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk doesn't do anything like you describe. Is this the SDK you're using? I believe the last major update to this SDK from the "old" facebook SDK was to add support for OAuth-style authentication. With this change they broke code compatibility so apps were forced to make changes to incorporate the latest SDK.

When you call 'authorize' in this SDK you pass the app id, the desired permissions, and a callback delegate for notifications of errors or success (did login, did not login, did logout). You can also set any access token that you might have persisted from a previous session. Facebook validates this access token, and if it doesn't exist or is invalid it presents a modal login dialog. I believe the content of this dialog is a web page. The SDK authenticates the user using OAuth and makes the auth-token available for persisting between sessions.

At no time is the app exited to run the Facebook app or Safari. I'm curious - what led you to believe this was the case? (Or, perhaps there is some other SDK out there I'm unaware of?)

Answer 3

Take a look on this page: https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk

And look at Single Sign-On . That describes the above scenario with fast switching.