Retriving data from facebook events - facebook

Question

I have to create an webpage where i need to show all the events from the past or upcoming ones from an facebook page. I have to retrive the title, description, image, time and place of every single one and make a box with it.
After that, i have to retrive all the interested people.
I'm a beginner trying to make big things! Thank you very much.

Answer 1

This isnt a simple problem - I have just done this so will give you a start.
You need to use Facebooks Graph API to get the data, you will need to read up on the Graph API and how to use it. Documentation can be found here. Its worth noting due to a security breach the API isn't offering all of its services to new developers currently but you can get most - read about this here.
You can query the API using any language but I suggest do it with python and use the requests module. Alternatively you could use this SDK which makes things a lot easier, trust me! With the SDK you need to get a user access token which you can get from here.
SDK
With the SDK its possible to do this
import facebook
graph = facebook.GraphAPI(access_token="your_token", version="2.12")
event = graph.get_object(id='event_id',
fields='attending_count,declined_count')
print(event['attending_count'])
print(event['declined_count'])
You can add more fields to the fields list. However you can use any language you choose to request the data, as you can just construct your own URL's.
Graph API & Requests
This is how I did it in python using requests to query the API.
import requests, json
#Make a requests session to fetch data from URL's
session = requests.Session()
session.mount('https://', requests.adapters.HTTPAdapter(max_retries=10))
#API base URL
baseUrl = 'https://graph.facebook.com/v2.11/'
#Fields you want to get
fields = ['id', 'name', 'start_time', 'end_time', 'description', 'place']
#replace CLIENT_ID and CLIENT_SECRET with ones from a facebook app (make one)
tokenPath= 'oauth/access_token?client_id={0}&client_secret={1}&&'\
'grant_type=client_credentials'.format(CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET)
#Get the generated token
token = session.get(baseUrl + tokenPath).json()['access_token']
event = session.get(baseUrl, params={
"ids": "event_id",
"fields": ",".join(fields),
"access_token": token,
}
).json()
print(event["name"])
print(event["place"])
You can make a facebook app here which is where the CLIENT_ID & CLIENT_SECRET come from.
Why would you use URL requests and not the SDK?
Using the SDK the generated user access tokens expire every day, its possible to extend them but only for 60 days. If you want to use the SDK it has a method built in which allows you to extend the token, in order to extend the token you also need to create a facebook app. Its also possible to extend tokens using this website, though I cant vouch for its security - it could potentially access and exploit your data.
To extend the token with SDK:
import facebook
graph = facebook.GraphAPI(user_access_short_lived_token)
extended_token = graph.extend_access_token(app_id, app_secret)
print(extended_token)
Using the URL approach, you create a client access token at runtime (read about user access token vs client access token here) and the token is valid so long as your app is active. So if you are going to use this a lot or want to create it and not have to change/extend tokens then use the URL approach.
Hope this gets you started.