Xamarin Social post without interface prompt - ShareItemAsync - xamarin

Question

I'm trying to post directly to facebook/twitter without prompting the user with a UIViewController using the following code:
// 1. Create the service
var facebook = new FacebookService {
ClientId = "<App ID from developers.facebook.com/apps>",
RedirectUrl = new System.Uri ("<Redirect URL from developers.facebook.com/apps>")
};
// 2. Create an item to share
var item = new Item { Text = "Xamarin.Social is the bomb.com." };
item.Links.Add (new Uri ("http://github.com/xamarin/xamarin.social"));
// 3. Present the UI on iOS
var shareController = facebook.GetShareUI (item, result => {
// result lets you know if the user shared the item or canceled
DismissViewController (true, null);
});
PresentViewController (shareController, true, null);
BUT the Xamarin.Social instructions say:
As an alternative to presenting the share UI, you can share items directly using the **ShareItemAsync** method of the service.
https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Social
I can't find any examples or explicit tutorials on how to use this. Can anyone help me on this please?

Answer 1

If you look at the source of Xamarin.Social, internally ShareItemAsync is used anyways to carry out the requests. GetShareUI is just a wrapper around ShareItemAsync.
From the source of ShareViewController (which gets the UI), you can see how they are using ShareItemAsync to carry out the requests. Here's the snippet for you.
try {
service.ShareItemAsync (item, account).ContinueWith (shareTask => {
StopSharing ();
.
.
.
.
.
}, TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext ());
}
So all you need to do is create the item, get hold of the account and call the method on the service, something like this
var item = new Item { Text = "Xamarin.Social is the bomb.com." };
item.Links.Add (new Uri ("http://github.com/xamarin/xamarin.social"));
var account = facebook.GetAccountsAsync().FirstOrDefault();
facebook.ShareItemAsync(item, account);