What is the difference between showFeedDialog and publishUserAction Facebook API?

Question

1. I saw few tutorials mentioning showFeedDialog, but none that mention how to use publishUserAction. what is the difference anyway?

2. Is there anyway to use showFeedDialog without prompting the user ?

3. Are there any good tutorial on how to use publishUserAction?

4. why does publishuseraction have a suqeuncebase parameter while showfeedialog doesn't have

Answer 1

1) showFeedDialog is a Javascript-only method that is used to render a UI element. Specifically, it renders a dialog box that prompts a user to publish a story to their profile (or a friend's profile). It can be used via Facebook Javascript (FBJS), or the Facebook Connect Javascript libraries.

publishUserAction is an API method, and can be called using any of the Facebook API libraries, including the server-side ones. You don't need a user's confirmation to publish something using this call. However, it can now only publish one-line stories by default, and these do not appear in the main news feed anymore.

The doc pages for showFeedDialog and publishUserAction have some examples, albeit small and not entirely useful ones.

2) There is not, unfortunately, unless the user has granted extended permissions to your application. You generally have to prompt for extended permissions as well.

3) Facebook's documentation is very poor. Your best bet is usually to check out the API documentation on the specific method you want to use, google around like a crazy person, then set up a test in a development application.

4) Only API calls that rely on a session require the sig parameter (deprecated functions had a separate call_id parameter, but that has been rolled into sig in newer versions of the API functions). showFeedDialog is not an API call, it's a Javascript library call, and it handles all the necessary API stuff for a feed prompt in the background.