I already have code in my Nativescript app that will open facebook to a specific page, using the Facebook app if it's installed or otherwise using the default browser.
Now I have a case where I have the name and address of a person, and I'd like to add a "Find on Facebook" function that will open the search results page, in Facebook, given that person's name, city, and state.
If I go into Facebook, do a simple search on name only, the results have a url such as
https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=Aaron%20Rider&epa=SEARCH_BOX
If I tap the Person tab and add a city and state, then the url becomes:
https://www.facebook.com/search/people/?q=Aaron%20Rider&epa=FILTERS&filters=eyJjaXR5Ijoie1wibmFtZVwiOlwidXNlcnNfbG9jYXRpb25cIixcImFyZ3NcIjpcIjEwNzc0MjQ2OTI1NDk3M1wifSJ9
And, in either case, using the Facebook scheme of fb:// with the url only opens the app but not to the search results.
So, is there a way to open the Facebook app or web site, via a url, to the search results for a given name, city, and state? My searches and testing to date haven't yielded any useful results.
Edit May 14, 2020:
To clarify further... my app determines whether the Facebook app is installed or not. If so, in invokes Facebook via a fb://... url, and if not, it opens a browser with an https://www.facebook.com/... url.
Based on this page, I discovered the http solution. For example, if the person in question is Andy Griffith in Raleigh, then the associated url would be https://www.facebook.com/search.php?type=users&q=Andy%20Griffith&lo=Raleigh. This brings up facebook's search results page with the location filter added. Yay!
What I'm still looking for is the equivalent fb:// url when opening the Facebook app. So far I can only bring up the search page, but without any input parameters or filters applied.
Edit May 15, 2020, for those following along at home...
Still searching. I happened to find this repository, which can create Facebook search urls with filters, and this page, which describes how the filters are created (base64 encoding of a JSON object).
I was able to compose a URL that worked with the Facebook web site, but that same url content with the fb:// scheme just takes me to the Facebook app's search home screen with no parameters passed.
Dang, this looked so promising!
Related
I'm working on a photo contest fb app to run in a fan page tab. the user should be able to share the photo in order for others to vote for them.
supposing image link in iframe is http://example.com/image.php?id=1 for particular photo, pressing share will share this link through iframe. which leads up to the host app itself.
what I need is sharing the whole fb app tab page url with http://example.com/image.php?id=1 open in its Iframe.
is that possible in any way?
thanks for help.
So to give the “alternative” to #Lix’ answer, which focuses on canvas apps, here the analog way for page tab apps:
For some reason Facebook decided to do things differently for page tab apps – different than with canvas apps, you can not pass just any GET parameters to your app by appending them to the facebook.com address of your app, but you have to use the app_data parameter for that.
You call/link to your app in the form https://www.facebook.com/YourPage?v=app_1234567890&app_data=foo – and whatever you put as value for the parameter app_data, you will find in the signed_request parameter that Facebook POSTs to your app on initial(!) load into the iframe.
So you parse the signed_request (or let f.e. the PHP SDK do that for you), and then you find the app_data value in there. If you want to pass more than one single value, you can f.e. also put JSON-encoded data there – then you have to decode that again after you read the app_data value from the signed request.
The docs just shortly mention the app_data parameter, but the principle itself is quite simple.
Now, when it comes to sharing those links, I found that when you use an address in the above form, Facebook tends to cut the parameters from the URL, and treat the whole link as just a link to your Facebook page – it shows the page’s picture and description, and does not even pass your page tab app along, let alone the app_data parameter.
I found the most reliable way around this is not to link to your page tab on Facebook directly, but instead to a URL of your own app. When the scraper visits it, you deliver the relevant OG information. And when it’s a real user visiting, you redirect them to your page tab app, passing the data you need via the app_data parameter as described above. Redirecting can either be done server-side (info on how to detect the scraper server-side via its User-Agent header), or client-side via JavaScript (which the scraper does not “speak”).
Sure it is. All you have to do is be able to extract the information from your application canvas URL. If your canvas URL is something like this:
https://apps.facebook.com/ImadBakir
Then you could place some more info in there, like this:
https://apps.facebook.com/ImadBakir?photo_id=123
Users will share that link and now in your application, you can parse that photo_id parameter and make the needed HTML changes to display the correct image inside your iframe as the page and application loads.
With regard to parsing the the URL parameters, assuming you'll be doing it with JavaScript, you can read more about it in this post:
How can I get query string values in JavaScript?
i have a tab in a page, with an iframe to a site built up to be like a simple facebook app, where users can create simple profile pages with an image and some text.
Now, once the profile is created (which is a simple html page with its own URL), i need to be able to share it, using some sharing services (like addthis) or even the standard send button. The problem is that the original site has to be always hidden (users have to not be able to see the URL of the "site"), but the sharing system need an absolute URL to know... what to actually share.
Obiouvsly, working in an iframe, the url is always that of the facebook page (it doesn't change navigating the site's pages), so how can I do this?
Thanks.
The problem is that the original site has to be always hidden (users have to not be able to see the URL of the "site")
Why not?
Please don’t say “security concerns” right now, because you should know there is no such thing as “security by obscurity” …
If you just want to have Open Graph URLs, that can be liked and shared, but want the user clicking on one of those URLs end up being in your iframe tab on Facebook again – then do a redirect to your page tab for actual users.
Either do it via JavaScript (which the Facebook scraper does not care about); or with a server-side redirect for any client that is not the Facebook scraper (it’s identifiable by it’s user agent or originating IP address of the request).
I tried googling & checking stackoverflow for the possible solution but haven't found any yet, so would like to bring it up here again.
I have a Facebook page, page has multiple tabs, and one of the tab has a Facebook App (accessed only through the tab, redirect the http://apps.facebook.com/myapp to the page tab)
I have some content (say non-fan content) to be displayed to the user before he likes the page.but, I don't have any way to check if the user has liked the page unless he adds the app & fb documentation has stuff that can give me the required like FQL page_fan, url_like, api(/me/likes/FACEBOOK_PAGE_ID) but each one of this needs an accesstoken (which I cannot get before the user adds the app).
some of the posts on stackover flow says that is not possible without getting the user to add the app. but there are apps like static html, static iframe & others which provides this functionality, how ?
Please advise.
Facebook will POST a signed_request to your server when the user opens the page tab.
This is what you get when you parse the signed_request:
{
"algorithm":"HMAC-SHA256",
"issued_at":1309468031,
"page":{
"id":"xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
"liked":true,"admin":true
},
"user":{"country":"fr","locale":"en_US","age":{"min":21}
}
The important part is "page.liked" where you see if the user likes the page.
No permissions and no app authorization is needed for this to work.
Search the web about parsing the signed_request in your favorite web programming language i.e. php.
I have implemented the like button on a website. People have liked the website, and I have the option to administer that open graph object. However, on the administration page I see the following notice:
Administer Your Page
This is the administration interface for your
webpage at [...]. You can see Insights and
publish to the users that have liked your webpage. Only the
administrators of the webpage can view this interface, other users are
sent to the webpage.
This is a ghost page, because, as the notice says, only the administrator(s) can see it. I don't want the behavior of users being sent to my website. I want them to be able to stay on Facebook and see this page, just like they would see and interact with another business page.
Is there a tool or a request form to do this kind of migration (i.e. from an open graph page to a normal business page)?
I have researched for about two days for this issue, but I have not found any leads.
According to this help article, you can merge two facebook pages into one. But the constraint is that you can merge to a page with higher likes only, and the page with fewer likes will be removed. I am not sure if it works for ghost pages or not.
Shef, let me try to answer:
if you have an app myapp, that is canvas url https://apps.facebook.com/myapp
then you will have an application profile page: http://www.facebook.com/myapp [*]
So if a search your app from google or facebook, then they come to first this page,
and if they click go to app, they reach to your app.
However if you have just implemented like url: myapp.com/myitem=1
then you will have this "ghost" page. You need this ghost page, because you need somewhere
to administrate your likes
So you are asking a real page instead ghost, well this is hard to implement this request by facebook guys. Because there is like link to refer some url. So there must be some pop up asking user: 'Do you want to follow link or go to business page instead'
[*] username is not available anymore for facebook apps. see How to get name of facebook application page?
You can use the ref parameter while specifying your like button. This ref parameter will be set by Facebook, for all url's/links that appear on Facebook, i.e wherever this like action is displayed with the link to the url liked by the user. So you know when a user visits your page through Facebook. Check the following from this link:
ref - a label for tracking referrals; must be less than 50 characters and can contain alphanumeric characters and some punctuation (currently +/=-.:_). The ref attribute causes two parameters to be added to the referrer URL when a user clicks a link from a stream story about a Like action:
fb_ref - the ref parameter
fb_source - the stream type ('home', 'profile', 'search', 'other') in which the click occurred and the story type ('oneline' or 'multiline'), concatenated with an underscore.
Upon calling your url you can redirect the user to the page on Facebook that you want. Business pages on Facebook have a particular url, of course, and you can easily do the redirect.
I don't think that you have an option to migrate an open graph page to a normal business page. You can however create your page, and give it the same name as your website. The draw back here would be when users like your page on Facebook, you won't be able to accumulate the likes already garnered by your website.
EDIT
Take a look at the like box plugin (Facebook doc here ). It can be used to like pages that are on Facebook itself, from external websites. This way you will be able to accumulate your likes. You can also modify the plugin to look like a like button, not fully but almost. But you still end up creating a new page. And the old likes will not be available.
I would like to place a link from my application's narrow profile box to it's application tab on the same profile.
I have combed through the FBML documentation to no avail. I have posted this question on the Facebook dev forums. I have experimented with pasting the URL of the tab into the profile box link without success (ajax may be getting in the way?).
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
You asked this a very long time ago, but it ranks well in Google for some search terms so here goes:
To link to a specific profile tab you can use the following href in your anchor
facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456&v=app_654321
obviously you need to replace the profile id and app id with correct values.
With the new short urls you may use this href
facebook.com/shorturl?v=app_654321
Both will load up the users profile with your apps tab already selected.
It is possible, but not with the profile.php... It always redirects to page wall, no matter of v parameter.
The only way I know is to give a direct link, ie.
http://www.facebook.com/MichaelJordan?v=info
The problem is that you have to know this name in the link (MichaelJordan).
To go to your application's tab, you need parameter v=app_APPID