Access token for a simple FQL retrieving the number of status for a page - facebook-fql

Question

I'm doing a really simple PHP app using the latest Facebook PHP SDK which aims to display the number of status a page of mine has.
To do so I created an app to have the app id and the app secret but after I'm kinda lost.
I thought I needed an app secret token so I first tried like this:
<?php
public function getFacebookPosts() {
require __DIR__ . '/libs/facebook-sdk/facebook.php';
$appId = 'myID';
$appSecret = 'mySecret';
$facebook = new Facebook(array(
'appId' => $appId,
'secret' => $appSecret,
));
$token = $this->getFacebookAppToken($appId, $appSecret);
try {
$jinnove = $facebook->api('/my.page');
$fql = '/fql?q=SELECT+status_id+FROM+status+WHERE+uid=' . $jinnove['id'] . '&' . $token;
var_dump($facebook->api($fql));
} catch(FacebookApiException $e) {
var_dump($fql, $e);
}
}
/**
* Function to Get Access Token from Facebook
* #param $appId
* #param $appSecret
* #return string
*/
protected function getFacebookAppToken($appId, $appSecret)
{
$args = array(
'grant_type' => 'client_credentials',
'client_id' => $appId,
'client_secret' => $appSecret
);
$ch = curl_init();
$url = 'https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token';
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $args);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
return $data;
}
But it returns me an error 102 with the following message: "A user access token is required to request this resource.".
So then I asked on IRC and someone told me I need a user access token to do that.
Of what I've understood a user access token can only be generated when a user explicitly log into facebook to authorize this app and renew the token sometimes.
Is that true? Is there no way to use a token which doesn't imply the user to be logged? Basically anyone can view this number of status, even people who don't have a Facebook account and I want no UI dialog at all.

Answer 1

For some reason, Facebook has decided that querying a status can only be done by a user.
You can get around this by querying the stream table, and only returning posts with type = 46, which are status updates:
SELECT post_id FROM stream WHERE source_id= YOUR_PAGE_ID AND type = 46 LIMIT 100
The stream table has a lot of restrictions on it. Even with a high LIMIT, you may not get all the status updates if the page has been around for a while.
You can also speed up your program by cutting the number of API calls from 3 to 1 with the following changes:
If you want to get a page's ID from its username replace = YOUR_PAGE_ID in the above query with IN (SELECT id FROM profile WHERE username = 'YOUR_PAGE_USERNAME')
You don't need the 'getFacebookAppToken()` function. The PHP SDK will automatically get you an app access token if you don't have an authenticated user.