Capturing the User Profile
Due to the vast array of methods, social access functions, and container social hooks available, a developer has numerous options for accessing a user’s profile data. Two of the most popular consist of standardized AJAX request methods; both provide the same results, but they have radically different ways of getting there.
Old method
The traditional AJAX social request method—used as the primary
request functionality up until OpenSocial 0.9—is newDataRequest
. Even though it is more laborious, this method is widely
used because it is backward compatible.
While method names and parameters for different data fetches
change, you still have to call standard methods to set up a data
request. When making a get
request,
we first set up our data request object using the newDataRequest
method, as follows:
var req = opensocial.newDataRequest();
Now that the data request container object is available, we can
create the key value parameter list to define the profile data that we
capture. Our key indicates that we want
to capture PROFILE_DETAILS
, and the value array
contains the list of OpenSocial Person
fields that we want to capture. In
this example, we are capturing the user’s name and thumbnail
URL:
var params = {}; params[opensocial.DataRequest.PeopleRequestFields.PROFILE_DETAILS] = [ opensocial.Person.Field.NAME, opensocial.Person.Field.THUMBNAIL_URL ];
We then add a newFetchPersonRequest
call to our initial
data request to indicate that we want to capture Person
data ...
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