Facebook Connect Bug - JavaScript Refresh

Question

Facebook Connect has a recent bug that is causing the permissions pop-up window to not close and refresh the parent window as it is designed to do. Instead, after approval by the user it attempts to load the page directly in the pop-up window which is an awful user experience and really hurting our registrations. You can see the bug by registering for our site using Facebook Connect: http://alltrails.com

The URL of the page after the user connects that Facebook Connect is incorrectly loading in the permissions pop-up window is of the form:

http://alltrails.com/?installed=1&session={"session_key":"2.Gu0duOqdElNjXRac5wnetw__.3600.1283799600-1486832834","uid":1486832834,"expires":1283799600,"secret":"tKFaEgBTF9RJeuQZfYUSCw__","base_domain":"alltrails.com","sig":"a8dd9f75418b530ae6c3d935e14274c4"}

I'm hoping that someone much better at JavaScript than myself could suggest a simple code snippet that we could add to our homepage that would only be invoked if the page URL includes '?installed=1' and would do the following to allow the same user experience as Facebook Connect was intended to provide:

1. Close the permissions pop-up window
2. Load the appropriate page http://alltrails.com/register/facebook in the original parent window

I've tried to do this a bunch of different ways but haven't had any luck with getting it to work correctly. Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Same problem here as well

Answer 2

It's a (unconfirmed) bug.

http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=12260

Hopefully it gets more votes so it gets fixed - vote people!

In the meantime, i am (attempting) to employ the following 'creative workaround':

1. Add logic to my Default.aspx page to detect that URL they are redirecting to in the popup.
2. Redirect to my page, FacebookInboundAuthorization.aspx, preserving querystring.
3. On load of that page, register some JavaScript to close the popup and manually fire the "onlogin" event handler for my button.

EDIT - Another possible solution

So i do something like this for the "Disconnect from Facebook" button, which has a similar bug which has been in FBC from day 1. If the user is already logged in, and you click the "Disconnect from Facebook" button, the "onlogin" handler is not fired.

So what i ended up doing is replacing the Facebook Disconnect button with my own regular anchor tag, mimicing the Facebook CSS. This way i can have full control over the click event (fire the function i want).

So, this principle could (theoretically) be applied to this current bug.

That is, after you do FB.Init on client-side:

1. Check FB auth status using FB.Connect.ifUserConnected
2. If user is connected, hide the regular FB:Login button, and show your "fake" FB Login button. Copy across the "onlogin" function from your regular FB:Login button to your fake button as the onclick event.

Your Fake FB Login button would be a regular anchor tag, with the same CSS applied to the regular FB Login buton.

So essentially, if the user is already connected, we don't really need FB's intervention for authentication, we can just do whatever we want (request perms, redirect, etc).

That should work.

Unfortunately i have higher priority things i need to work on, but it sounds like this is top priority for you.

So give that a go, hope it helps.