Getting (and keeping) extended permissions in a facebook app - facebook

I'm using an fb login button on a site, and our app needs extended permissions: publish_stream. When the user logs in, we can get the permissions, get an access_token, and publish various items to their stream.
However, the site doesn't seem to know if the user's logged in to facebook or not, and I'm having to allow permissions on subsequent visits to the page. However, if I hit the website, I get the access_token - but I'm the admin of the facebook app.
Is there a way to get permissions and have them persist, or am I doing something wrong?

It sounds like you might need to request the "offline_access" extended permission (if you want to make API calls after a normal access token would have expired). I'm not sure this is what you need though - this is for making API calls as a user while the user is not logged in to Facebook anymore.
It sounds like your Application is not properly using the API to check if the user is logged in or not. Without seeing any code I can't tell what is happening, but if you are using the API correctly once a user has authorized your application, they should be able to make API calls via your App while they are logged in to Facebook. Unless you changed application's on them, they will not need to re-authorize the permissions.
Please edit your question to provide more details if this does not help, and good luck.

Related

What is needed to access another user's facebook posts ("App Not Setup")

I have a desktop app which uses a user access token to read the me/feed endpoint and I can see all the posts for the logged in user. If I wanted to simplify deployment to different users I would need to minimise the amount of setup/configuration they did.
Is there a way to access me/feed for a given userid rather than have to setup every user as a developer account and create an app for it?
I have looked at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/using-graph-api/v2.0 and it is not obvious to me how to do this.
What configuration / permissions does the user in question need to do to activate this. Which access token should I be using, and will it give access to all the posts in the same way the user access token does.
[EDIT] I have looked at this again and the problem I am having is that when a user (who has a facebook account but is NOT a developer) tries to login to my App (which is in development mode) I get the following error
"App Not Setup: The developers of this app have not set up this app properly for Facebook Login."
Thanks in advance

Facebook integration with website - logout user from facebook if user doesn't grant permission to the app

I am working with integration of a website with facebook.
I have a specific requirement where-in the user should get logged-out from facebook if he/she doesn't grant permissions to my facebook-app (on first use).
Now, If user denies access for my facebook-app, I am redirected to the redirect_uri, but the problem is that on the page that handles the redirection, I cannot log the user out from facebook since my app won't have permission to perform logout.
Can anyone please tell me what is the workaround I could try?
I have a specific requirement where-in the user should get logged-out from facebook if he/she doesn't grant permissions to my facebook-app (on first use).
Is this in a very special environment (like a kiosk application or something) …?
Because otherwise, I’d hate it if random apps logged me out of FB while I’m browsing on my own computer, just because I don’t want to connect to them.
Now, If user denies access for my facebook-app, I am redirected to the redirect_uri, but the problem is that on the page that handles the redirection, I cannot log the user out from facebook since my app won't have permission to perform logout.
Can anyone please tell me what is the workaround I could try?
I don’t know any workaround – to perform a log out on behalf of the user, you need a valid access token – doesn’t matter, if you’re trying to do it client-side or server-side.
If that wasn’t the case, any website I’m visiting could log me out of Facebook, and that would be really annoying to users.
We have exactly the same problem. We've developed a kiosk application used to checkin and post HD photos.
If the user does not accept the permissions we need to reload the application because we can't logout the user in another way.
We've tried different ways but no one was successful

How do I grant my app permissions on pages or groups I created?

I have an app, and I can write to user's walls with it, having requested the publish_stream permission when they sign in.
I've also created a page and a group, and would like my app to be able to write to those. (Specifically, I want my back-end server to post some updates to those periodically, without a user being involved.) The ability to do this seems to be implied by the descriptions of the /feed parts of those here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/page/ and here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/group/ . However, I can't seem to find a way to authorize the app to write to these pages. Those docs say it can be done if you have publish_streams and manage_pages. OK, but how do I grant those to my app?
In the user case, you request those permissions when the user signs in via the OAuth flow. However, the page and the group never sign-in, so there's no way for them to grant the app permission. I looked around the settings pages for the group and the page, and couldn't find anything that will let me add the app. So how do I give the app the required permissions to post to the group and the page?
Found it!
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/application/
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/howtos/login/login-as-page/
"Application Page Access Tokens
To perform the following operations as an Application Page, and not the current user, you must use the Application's Page access token, not the user access token commonly used for modifying Graph API objects nor the Application access token. This access token can be retrieved by issuing an HTTP GET to /USER_ID/accounts with the manage_pages permission. This will return a list of Pages (including Application profile pages) to which the user has administrative access, along with an access_token for each Page.
Note: Applications that are configured as Native/Desktop apps will not be able to make API calls that require an application access_token."
So:
I went to http://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/ and, as me, created an access token with "manage_pages" permission.
I then went to https://graph.facebook.com/$myname/accounts?access_token=$accesstoken
and it gave me a list pages and apps that I had given permission to. I copied the access_token from the relevant page, and pasted that into my code, so that the server-side create event code always used that access token.
And it worked!

Is it posible to change the scope of your Facebook Connect website?

I'm building a Facebook app with Facebook login via Oauth 2.0. Will it be possible to request more permissions (scope) from the user in the future as we add features or do we need to request them all up front?
Anyone implemented this with Facebook Connect?
From my experience, you can add permissions later and it'll prompt the user to accept those permissions. For my app, I started with just basic/email permissions and then added photo... and it would prompt for the photo.
You can call Facebook's permissions api (https://graph.facebook.com/me/permissions?access_token=...) to see if the user has authorized the permission you will need (perhaps they later when in and revoked part of your apps permission but not all of it). If they did, or you just later need different permissions, just show the authorization link like you did the first time with the additional permissions listed in the url (&scope=email,read_stream...) and it will prompt them for those.

How can I avoid asking users to login (connect) to my facebook app again and again?

I am developing and testing a facebook app for which I have granted the permissions with my facebook account. Then the app is authorized to access my info, etc. nicely. The next time I close the browser, reopen it, login to facebook successfully then access the app, facebook wants me to login to that app again. I can access the current user id, but how can I automatically authorize the app (if the user has already authorized in the past) without needing the user to press that dread 'Login' button again and again upon each session's end?
UPDATE - offline_access has been deprecated. Read this post for more details: https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/offline-access-removal/
You will need to request a token that has offline_access so that you can use their authentication token over and over again. Then you will need to set a cookie yourself that stores something indicating who the user is. Facebook does not support a "remember me" feature in their authentication so you have to build it yourself. Store the access token in your database and set the cookie to identify the user.
Unless you are building this for a very specific reason like an app that runs on work computers only, I would really encourage you to not implement this feature. The facebook connect authorization is well understood by users and is very easy to use. You are going to get a lot more security if you make your users press the button every time. Just make sure you make this optional. You never know if somebody is on a public computer.