Matias Paterlini

Facebook Development Conference

Facebook Apps Development and Monetization Conference at Fasta University

Poke the Pope Redesign is finished!

Facebook apps developer - be carefull with IGNORE button on requests

 One of the most important things that a facebook developer has to be concern about is facing a good viral grow implementation. Without this your possibilities of reaching a high volume of users accessing the app are very poor, including using ads to promote your app.

There are some precious tools that must be understood and be used properly by developers in order to maintain their apps growing every day. One of those tools are user requests (fb:request).

According to the post "Feedback-based allocations for requests and invites" published on Facebook Developer News page, "Applications will no longer have a static upper limit of 20 requests, but instead requests will be allocated based on how users have responded to past actions. The number of requests per application will be based on the rate that users accept and ignore requests...{}".

People receives from 3 to more than 10 or 15 request a day, and if you pay attention, most of the apps only show 2 buttons, "Confirm" and "Ignore" buttons. Most of us like to keep our accounts clean, so if we don't want to play we have no choice than ignoring...

So, let me share with you my workaround to get the less Ignored request possible on your app based on Sudha Jamthe suggestions and a simple trick that came to my mind after some research.

The idea is very simple and based on two tips:

• Any request button (fb:req-choice) pressed on a facebook request that is not "Ignore" button are considered as acceptance buttons.
• You can only set the URL and the name of the button.

So we created this 3 buttons :

• Play now! - That's acceptance button, that we link to our canvas page file to make the action requested.
• Not right now - This is added to avoid users pressing Ignore. HERE is the trick. We set the url like this:

• Block sending requests - This one is linked to our canvas page to set in our database that this user doesn't want to receive requests anymore, (at least for now), later we can ask him if he still doesn't want to receive requests...

By using this logic, we increased in less than three weeks from 16 up to 30 available request per day.

I hope that helps a little, and we can keep discussing new ways to improve and make our apps more viral!.

Thanks!!

Matias Paterlini

Hibernate error: "could not execute native bulk manipulation query"

I was getting this error:

exception: org.hibernate.exception.SQLGrammarException: could not execute native bulk manipulation query

After looking in more than 25 google results I couldn't find any clue about what could be happening. But somehow I got illuminated and found what was happening. That's why I'm writing this post.

This was my code before I saw the problem:

Let Me tell you something about this error. I'm not a hibernate crack, but as you can see it's saying that you can't create a bulk delete on a sql query by using hibernate.

The error in this code is that I was executing a HQL script using createSQLQuery method which is completely wrong, I should use createQuery.

So there's nothing much to say, If you want to make a bulk task like an update of multiple records or a deletion of multiple rows using a simple query, you MUST use a HQL query.

Hope that helps a little!

Matias Paterlini