I have tried just about everything at this point, but I cannot get a like or a comment to show up as my user, if I am logged in as the admin of a page. My app allows people to manage their pages, but even if I pass my user's access token back instead of my page's access token, it still performs the action as though it were the page. This is also true of the Graph API explorer. I've logged into Facebook, flipped over to posting as user, then ran the graph API on the post in question, generating a fresh access token from there and the post STILL showed up as the page! Is this broken? Should I submit this bug to FB?
Yes I have all the required permissions, yes I'm verifying that I'm using the user access token and not the page access token... the Facebook API returns true every time, however, even through the Graph API explorer and not through my app.
http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/408406055876958
This is a known facebook bug, opened in July, with no timetable for fixing it.
Related
I am pulling my hair out trying to understand what Facebook wants me to do to post to a FaceBook Page as a System User that has Admin and Page Privileges to and Owned by our business (We have Facebook Business Manager).
In a nut shell all I want to do is make this call:
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.5/${MyPageID}/feed
What I don't get is the access_token part.
I can generate access tokes for Apps, for Pages but all result in 403 returned from FaceBook. I have gone as far and checking every box available on the generate access token popup on the graph api and still I get 403 "Forbidden" so I am detailing the little I understand of the insanity that is FaceBook Auth in the hope that someone can explain where I am going wrong.
1) To Post as a System User to a Page I have to Create a FB App (I Would prefer just to post direct to the pages and skip the App part, My System User has Admin Access on All pages)
2) To Access the App I need an App Token.
3) To Create an App token I need a User Token.
4) To Create a user token I need to log in to Facebook and have all sorts of permissions on the App. (I can't log in as the System User! FB asks me to login as myself. I am not sure if this breaks the Auth Token generated?)
5) Then there are all sorts of swapping tokens to get a Permanent App token, Another point of potential failure!
6) IF the stars and moon align and you stand on your head the permanent App key can be passed to the above call as the access_token
I don't understand how to link the Pages I want to post to with the App created. Do I have to have 1 App for Each Page?
I have got one page to work, We initially used that App to Auth against the Instant Article Graph API:
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.5/${MyPageID}/instant_articles
I could not use the above token for the /feed url, I had to generate a new token with extra publish permissions and the page published with no problems, however when I change the ${MyPageID} to another page using the same access_token I get the 403.
I tried Creating a new App, I have no clue how they link to a specific page So the App to me seems sort of redundant.
Any help with what I am doing wrong or how I can go about simply posting to various FB Pages with a System User using the /feed api ?
The calls are made form a Spring Boot Java APP using HTTP Posts.
How to get a System User Auth and Page Auth:
1) Generate a User Token for an App (Button above the System User):
https://business.facebook.com/settings/system-users/${System User ID}?business_id=${your_business_manager_id}
System user has Page Admin on each page you need to post to.
App is just an FB app, not sure what it does other that it is a grouping I generate a token against.
I chose: (manage_pages, publish_pages, publish_actions, pages_manage_instant_articles, pages_show_list)
2) Check your access token:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/accesstoken/?access_token=${The access token you got from the step above}&version=v2.12
This will provide you with the App ID the Token is for and how long it lasts (we need a Permanent token)
3) Using Graph API Explorer gets the Accounts this token has access to:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/${Your FB APP ID}/?method=GET&path=me%2Faccounts&version=v2.12
4) Using the output above find Page Auth for each page you wan to publish to
5) Post to each page in turn:
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.5/${MyPageID}/feed
I've been reading documentation and Stack Overflow link all morning, but I'm just not understanding the correct process to authorize a web server to post to a Facebook page wall.
What I'm not clear on is why I have to post to Facebook as a Facebook User, using an access_token, meaning that this user has to log into Facebook manually to authorize my app.
I'm not trying to authorize a User, nor any of my visitors to do anything with their accounts, so I don't need any permissions from them. Instead, I'm trying to authorize my Web Server to post updates to its wall as a specific Page.
Why do I have to use a user access_token to do this? I'm not attempting to impersonate the user, I'm trying to post to the page as the page...
Is it possible to authorize a user and get their access token without having to create a login page on the Web Server? I don't want to have to require the user to login to make this work, I thought that was the point of having an app ID and Secret?
I guess my question is this: Is it not possible to allow a web server to post to a Facebook page wall as that page, without having to present a login dialog to a specific user? If it is possible, what is the correct workflow to set this up?
In order to post to a Page as a Page, you have to use a Page Access Token. You get that with a User Access Token, and you can extend it so it will stay valid forever.
Steps:
Request a User Access Token with the manage_pages permission (valid for up to 2 hours)
Extend the User Access Token (valid for up to 60 days)
Get the Extended Page Access Token for your Page with the User Session
Store and User The Page Access Token in the publish call
It may sound a bit complicated, but there are many tutorials for this and you don´t actually need to program it, you can just use the Graph API Explorer.
Here are some Links about the Access Tokens:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens/
http://www.devils-heaven.com/facebook-access-tokens/ (see "Extended Page Access Token" for a step by step tutorial)
I am looking for a solution to fetch the feeds of an alcohol-related/age-restricted Facebook Brand Page by a website or back-end service to show these infos in that website for any user.
i.e: https://graph.facebook.com/JimBeam
The standard call results with an error or false.
I know the reason is the age-restictrion because of the relation to alcohol.
If I am connected to Facebook and add an access_token (user-token or page-token) to the request, I get everything I need, but it doesn't work if I am not connected.
If I request the page-token with offline_access, it also does not work when I am not connected to Facebook.
I am a bit confused with all this token types, offline_access, permissions and so on.
Is possible to get the fb-graph-feed of an age-restricted page and load that into a website?
To get an age-restricted feed you need to have a user access token that meets the criteria for the page. So if a user is visiting your site, they will need to authenticate your app, and then you can use the resulting access token to pull information to your website from that restricted page.
You should not be using a user's access token to display content to another user who does not meet the restrictions on the Facebook page.
An added problem is that Facebook does not expose a page's restrictions via the API, so you can't tell if a user has permission to see the page until your API request returns no data.
I have created an App on facebook and I am using this app to authorize an user via dotnetopenauth.
Here I would pass APPID and APPSECRET and get the token which would be used to call Facebook Graph to get facebook user details.
If I'm doing this for the first time, user would be asked to enter username/passowrd on the Facebook website and then the session is created in the browser and it will redirect to my website as a Facebook user. This means that if I open a new tab in the current window and open facebook, user will see his/her page directly without asking for username/password. - this is obvious and understandable.
// code
request = WebRequest.Create("https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=" + Uri.EscapeDataString(strAccessToken));
response = request.GetResponse();
My query is:
After the scenario above, if user logs out from Facebook website OR I close the browser window, the facebook session is lost. However, I still have the access token (string in the above code) that I got while authenticating.
So, As of this moment I am not storing any user information from Facebook (not even cookies or anything else). I am just requesting user to authorize my application as a Facebook user. When user does that, I get the access token which I can use it to make calls to Graph and REST APIs. This access token usually remains same, so I really dont need to pass the applicaition id and secret to get the token next time onwards. Actually I can request the graph APIs and REST APIs with the stored token and request user details. I have tested this and works fine.
What I am looking for is, if user opens www.facebook.com, user should see his/her personal facebook page which obviosuly is possible only if I have a session in the current browser. Hence, my question was: how do I use my access token OR what call should I make with my access token so that I can set the browser session for the facebook user? Is it possible technically?
Regards,
AG
No. Your access token is used by your web server to call facebook. It's impossible (and undesirable) for this to impact the user's browser in a way that would set a facebook.com cookie so that the user would be implicitly logged into Facebook by your use of the access token.
As mentioned in this other question, if a user grants the publish_stream permission, I can publish to that user's wall using an app access_token. I tested that and it works. But I couldn't publish to the user's pages using the app access_token! Am I missing something?
Right now I use the /me/accounts/ connection to get the access_token of the pages, and use that to publish. But this is a huge headache for me and for users because these tokens expire often (when users change their password, ...et), and every time that happens the publish fails and I need to email the user to come login again so I can retrieve a new access_token for the page. It's a bad user experience and I'm trying to find a way around it. The app token works for publishing to users, which is great, but I couldn't find a way to make it work for pages. Any tips?
Edit:
To clarify further, I currently request the manage_pages and offline_access permissions, and then fetch the access_token of each page and use that to publish to it. That works. The main problem is that tokens expire, even with the offline_access permission. The most common reason a token would expire is if the user changes her password. Here is a common error that I get a lot when publishing to Facebook pages.
Facebook error. type: OAuthException, message: 'Error validating
access token: Session does not match current stored session. This may
be because the user changed the password since the time the session
was created or Facebook has changed the session for security reasons.'
To handle this, I email the user and ask them to visit our app again, and when they do I grab a fresh set of access_token to work with. But that's problematic because users are confused about why the error happened and blame us for it, and some users don't open their emails so the problem doesn't get solved and then they're angry later when they discover that our app had stopped weeks ago without them asking it to stop.
That's why I was hoping that I can publish with the app access_token to avoid these problems. Since it works for user profiles, I hoped it would work for pages as well. But so far no luck, unless I'm missing something obvious.
What you're describing used to work - all last year we were able to successfully post to fan page walls using the app access token. In fact, for some of our users, I see it still working. However, I think the other two answers are correct, this is no longer the way to post to pages (see "Page Login" here)
That said, you should be able to store the access token of the page to spare yourself the step of re-querying the users' linked accounts.
Unfortunately, the page's access token will suffer the same fragility as a user's, per the answer here: Facebook Page Access Tokens - Do these expire? . The page access token will expire when the user who gave you that access token changes their password.
To publish to pages, there is an extra step where you use their token to get a list of their pages. Each page has its own token, use that token to post to the page. Keep in mind that when setting up the original token, you need to specify that you need access to pages.
my app does exactly what you're after.
I request both manage_pages and offline_access permissions from a user.
I store the user's access_token.
I ask the user which page (determined by me/accounts) they want a stream item posted to and when.
Later, when it is time to publish to a page's feed, I grab the user's access_token from the database, the pageid, and the message.
Using that user's access token, I query the me/accounts and grab the latest access token for that account (aka page)
Using that page's access token, I me/feed (or is it me/posts...away from my codebase at the moment) post the stream item.