Setting Up Facebook Application

Setting Up Your Application

If you click on Developer in your left-hand side navigation pane, you'll see a button to Set Up New Application:

You'll now find that you need to type in details about your application (obviously!). Some fields are required, while others are optional. We'll deal with the required
fields first.

Required Fields

Don't worry, you won't have masses of fields to fill in before you can get started with your application—in fact there is only one required field, plus a tick box:

So, all you have to do, at this stage, is choose a suitable name for your application. As this will be displayed on Facebook, decide on a name that describes your application best (avoiding anything rude or insulting). In this example, I'm developing an application for an imaginary private detective, Pygoscelis P. Ellsworthy, so I'm going to name the application Pygoscelis P. Ellsworthy's Suspect Tracker:

You'll need to tick the box to say that you've read the Facebook Platform terms and conditions (and we always read those, don't we?). However, don't click on Submit yet, as the remainder of the fields are defined as optional, although some are still essential (as we're about to see).

Optional Fields

By default, the optional fields are hidden, so to see them, click on Optional Fields (no surprise there then).

Base Options

As soon as you click on Optional Fields, the Base options will become visible—these are the options required by any application that you build, although others will be made available to you depending on what you enter into the Base options.

You'll see that Support E-Mail has already been filled in for you, using your Facebook email address. Obviously, you'll need to change that, if that's not the address that you want to use. Apart from Support E-Mail, there are only two fields that we're interested in at the moment:

• Callback URL—The URL of your application (that is on your server).
• Canvas Page URL—The URL for your application within Facebook (obviously this needs to be unique).

So, in the case of Pygoscelis P. Ellsworthy's Suspect Tracker, the optional fields would look like this:

And a big tip here—make sure that you end the Callback URL with a / (in your code, NOT in the Installation options box), and you'll save yourself many hours of heartache wondering why your application isn't working correctly.

You can ignore all the other fields in this section at the moment, apart from one question that you must answer, Can your application be added on Facebook? Obviously, the answer will be Yes. But don't worry about your application being accessed by thousands of people before you're ready—in a moment we'll see how to stop that.

When you set Can your application be added on Facebook? to Yes, you'll find that the Installation Options are displayed.