Facebooker talk - Feb 2008 - Running Facebooker from script/runner

I''m setting up a recurring (cron) task to trigger a method in my  
facebook controller. The point is to find all users that need to  
receive notification emails and send those messages off (every few  
hours, and only if they haven''t been sent already... don''t
want to be
spammy).

I''ve got infinite session keys for the users (at least for the ones  
who will be receiving email notifications), but I don''t know how to  
create a Facebooker session from those. I tried calling  
set_facebooker_session, but got this error:

     undefined local variable or method `set_facebook_session'' for  
FacebookController:Class

So it seems that the script/runner isn''t loading the facebooker  
plugin? Which doesn''t make much sense, because the facebooker YML  
config file is being processed, and that wouldn''t happen if the plugin
didn''t get loaded. What am I missing here? Is there a better way to do
recurring background notification tasks with facebooker?

Thanks!

Mark

I was able to solve this problem using some code I found in the  
facebooker_mq plugin - http://rubyforge.org/projects/facebooker-mq/

First, I create a session object, which is re-used for each user that  
needs a message sent:

     session = Facebooker::CanvasSession.create(
       ENV[ ''FACEBOOK_API_KEY'' ], ENV[
''FACEBOOK_SECRET_KEY'' ] )

Then, for each user being notified, if I''ve stored an infinite session
key for them, I secure the session (I only store the session keys if  
they''re infinite, so the expires parameter at the end is always 0):

     session.secure_with!( currentUser.infinite_session,  
currentUser.id, 0 )

Once that is done, the session key can be used normally (at least for  
the one call I''m making send_email).

The other thing I did, just to make sure this doesn''t mess up
"normal"
operation, was to move the background tasks into their own controller.  
I did not have this new class extend the ApplicationController class,  
because it doesn''t render any pages and so isn''t a true Rails
controller. I''m not totally sure, but I think its possible this code  
could be run out of a class in the lib directory (or a model class, if  
that were more appropriate for someone else''s app).

If there''s a better way to solve this problem, I''d be
interested in
knowing about it.

Thanks!

Mark

On Feb 24, 2008, at 5:09 PM, Mark Slater wrote:
> I''m setting up a recurring (cron) task to trigger a method in my
> facebook controller. The point is to find all users that need to
> receive notification emails and send those messages off (every few
> hours, and only if they haven''t been sent already...
don''t want to be
> spammy).
>
> I''ve got infinite session keys for the users (at least for the
ones
> who will be receiving email notifications), but I don''t know how
to
> create a Facebooker session from those. I tried calling
> set_facebooker_session, but got this error:
>
>     undefined local variable or method `set_facebook_session'' for
> FacebookController:Class
>
> So it seems that the script/runner isn''t loading the facebooker
> plugin? Which doesn''t make much sense, because the facebooker YML
> config file is being processed, and that wouldn''t happen if the
plugin
> didn''t get loaded. What am I missing here? Is there a better way
to do
> recurring background notification tasks with facebooker?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mark
> _______________________________________________
> Facebooker-talk mailing list
> Facebooker-talk at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/facebooker-talk