different versions of facebook for location based development?

Question

I am working on an app that uses facebook's check in feature from mobile phones. I have created multiple versions of the app on facebook so that i can keep production, test and development separated. All good. However, all my checkins whether test or dev or prod are going to the live facebook platform leading to check ins like "this is a test" or "blah blah" on live facebook pages. Is there a way to be able to check in but not on these real/live pages? In other words, is there a sandbox or development version where developers can freely update content?

Thanks you guys!

Best, Sachin

Answer 1

So, as with many other things in life, banging my head against the problem helped a bit. I found out that I can create test users for my app - upto 500 of them. The documentation is at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/. I was able to create test users for my app, login to facebook with those test users and verify that my actions did not show up on public pages. Phew, now i need to deface these public property no more. :-) When doing this, you need to use the app access token not the regular user accesss token. To get that, follow this link: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/applications/. The last gotcha I faced was that the second link above states that you should have a parameter named grant_type=client_credentials in your graph request. I kept looking for types of client credentials that i could substitute what i thought was a place holder named "client_credentials". That term needs to go in verbatim. (GOTCHA). Also, twice when I tried to create a user, facebook responded with an error json saying that an "unknown error has occured". I was almost ready to give up... but like i said before, banging head against the problem helps. Facebook responded with a json like so after the third request:

{
    "id":"*******1832",
    "access_token":"*****",
    "login_url":"https://www.facebook.com/platform/test_account_login.php?user_id=*****&n=*****",
    "email":"****",
    "password":"*****"
}

Hope this helps someone else who might also be looking for this info.