I'm working to enable my app to hit the FB Graph API to look up data on a user. I want to do this in a way that is app focused meaning it isn't based on a user signed into my app. It's a relationship between the app & the FB Graph API.
My understanding is I can do that with the APPLICATION ACCESS TOKEN is that right?
If I use my app access token here:
https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=born#gmail.com&type=user&access_token=208131059208382|xFN8da1tIDxuuMp8hoRtGs3l0aM
I get an error:
{
"error": {
"type": "OAuthException",
"message": "An access token is required to request this resource."
}
}
Why is that?
Can I use my personal FB account to hit the API for the purposes of the app?
When a user oAuth's in to an app, how long does the access token last? Is it something I can hard code in my app so I can hit the FB graph api?
Thanks
For a lot of things on Facebook, you have to have a valid session access token from the user. What this means is, the access token you get from a user must be used to access a resource. This is especially true when pulling data about the user out of the graph. The access token that FB gives you when the user loads your application typically lasts for an hour (if I recall correctly). The session object FB gives you tells you the expire time on the token, though.
If you need to access the data for a user in an offline manner, you could ask the user for the offline_access extended permission. Doing this makes Facebook give you an indefinite access token, which doesn't ever expire (unless the user changes their password). That allows you to query the graph on the user's behalf whenever you feel like doing it.
The search feature doesn't require an access token if you're performing a standard search, or a page search, etc. But it does require a valid access token when you're searching for users. I assume this is to keep people from hammering the search and crawling public user data with a bot.
You can follow the instruction in
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
take a look at https://github.com/michaelbaldry/fb_graph_canvas - It's a barebones canvas application that you can test locally. It uses fb_graph and is about as simple as can.
Related
I want my application to post to a single, pre-defined user's wall something like "We just posted a new blog at [URL]" with no client-side interaction.
But every answer I can find on this topic seems to hinge on getting an access token through
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token
Which gives you some redirect url through which a user has to log in manually.
I've got near zero experience with Facebook. Is it possible to automatically get an access token for a predefined user? Am I doing it wrong? ;)
You can't.
Facebook doesn't give you a way to automatically get an access token for a user. That user needs to log into Facebook and explicitly give your app permission. The best you can get is a long-lived access token that remains valid for up to 60 days.
Getting that token requires a two step process:
1) Logging into Facebook using either the JavaScript API or redirecting the user to a valid Facebook login URL.
2) Retrieving the short-lived access token you got in step 1 for a long-lived access token.
Once you've got that access token, should your post fail, you know you need to re-authenticate the user and get a new long-lived access token. Your user needs to be online and logged into Facebook for this to work, though it can happen without their interaction.
Interesting problem I'm having right now.
Signing in an App gives a access token looking something like this:
AAACwFsGcSr4BAOGUTwfuZAWuUcwZC0rJ7noZCKMqhBI7ivDCsIGqduGIZCus5PRaS6KuREqxLmhfvZAZAkz5WCpFfANtUpYHgZD
This access token can't access users PUBLIC information, while one issued by Facebook on developers.facebook.com - CAN.
You can easily test this by logging to your facebook and going to this link: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/
You'll see that Facebook automatically generates access token on DEMO urls like this one:
https://graph.facebook.com/me/music
?access_token=2227470867|2.AQCvlA_ZaJ2MfRR0.3600.1318266000.0-100001572415177|2FeweU6ZvOQS9OCF5ZBV58_PtPg
If you would change /ME/ to any user which has his MUSIC posted as public, you WILL be able to access that data with Graph API.
Now try to get an access token to your APP and call the same Graph API method with generated access token, the returned data is empty JSON object.
Whats’ the difference between these access tokens? How to obtain access token, that I could get public information using Graph API?
I was thinking that logging in your APP is the highest possible access token and the only higher token is token with specified permissions...
Any guidelines would be great :)
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/permissions/
I believe the difference is that you can specify additional permissions in a scope parameter,
so if you wanted to read a user's feed you would have to specify read_stream. I was trying to accomplish this with an access token from a server-side authentication flow in ruby, but the access token only allowed to me to navigate accross a certain portion of graph.facebook.com/user_id/feed? requests. If you get any insights or comes across a solution shoot it my way too, if you can.
I wonder is it possible to access user's wall info without passing his/her access token?
for example, I will just pass my app secret token and app id. and FB user already allows to access his/her info from my app. Facebook does the checking and matching of my app and my app's user by just using my app secret token and app id.
Because I found some topics similar to that.
http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?pid=9172
When I check Rest FB doc,it says like that.
http://restfb.com/javadoc/index.html
public DefaultFacebookClient()
Creates a Facebook Graph API client with no access token.
Without an access token, you can view and search public graph data but can't do much else.
I doubt that it will work or not without access token.
can everyone share me ideas or any possible similar approaches ?
Thanks.
You will need to ask the users to authorize your app for offline access. You will be able to access the user's wall even if the user is offline, but you still need the access token. It is part of Facebook's security measures.
There are two types of access tokens:
Session based: expires in a short term, are used when the user will be logged to FB every time you need to perform an operation.
Offline access: do not expire and allow the app to perform operations for the user in any moment. This requires the offline_access permission when the app is authorized.
Check here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/ for the oauth mechanism and here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions/ for the permissions list.
The REST API is deprecated and it is strongly suggested that you don't use it anymore. Furthermore, from this October you will be allowed to use only the Oauth2 authentication (see When is Facebook turning off their session based auth?)
Without token you can only access public information.
Public data
From RestFB homepage :
// It's also possible to create a client that can only access
// publicly-visible data - no access token required.
FacebookClient publicOnlyFacebookClient = new DefaultFacebookClient();
If the user does not protect his posts, then you can access everything without token. But most of user do protect their data and then you need a valid user access token to read the data.
Private data
When you say "FB user already allows to access his/her info from my app" it means that the user has clicked on "Allow app" in the web browser and at that moment here Facebook will give you a token. You can after use that token with RestFB :
FacebookClient facebookClient = new DefaultFacebookClient(USER_ACCESS_TOKEN);
User user = facebookClient.fetchObject("me", User.class);
out.println("User name: " + user.getName());
By default, the token will expire a few hours later. If you ask for the offline_access permission, the token will be valid for ever (as long as the user does not remove the permission for your app in his settings). You should store that token in your database to be able to use it when you need.
Get the user token
You cannot get the user token with RestFB. On the RestFB homepage, you can read :
Non-goals: [...] Providing a mechanism for obtaining session keys or OAuth access tokens
Because you need a browser to do so : the user has to authenticate and authorize your app on Facebook website (the popup that shows).
What you can do is to have a PHP page on which your users have to go to authorize your app. You can read this stackoverflow answer that explains how to use the Facebook PHP SDK to do so.
Hope that helps !
On the documentation page for Facebook Graph API there are a lot of example links such as https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes?access_token=SOME_AT
Could anyone explain how the access_token for these links are generated?
All I've read in the documentation were about getting access_token only for applications, but on that page everyone could get an access_token without one.
You can use the graph API to get public information. People set privacy settings on facebook, so to prevent social freaks from stalking you, they(fb) created Autorisation.What I believe is that on the documentation, they are generating the access token using the Developers App. You can generate this Access token by making an application and asking a user to Authorise your application to access his data using OAUTH dialogs. Usually people reading at developer.facebook.com have enabled the Developers app so it easily opens your information.
The Graph API as such allows you to
easily access all public information
about an object. For example,
https://graph.facebook.com/btaylor
(Bret Taylor) returns all the public
information about Bret. For example a
user's first name, last name and
profile picture are publicly
available.
To get additional information about a
user, you must first get their
permission. At a high level, you need
to get an access token for the
Facebook user. After you obtain the
access token for the user, you can
perform authorized requests on behalf
of that user by including the access
token in your Graph API requests:
The access_token in these links are generated using your Facebook identity and an application ID (presumable associated to "developers.facebook.com"). If you go to the same page with another Facebook account, you will see different access tokens.
I am using the facebook graph api to integrate some facebook functionality for users into a project i am working on. Its very early stages and I am just getting to grips with the Facebook API but it appears that every time a user logs on to my site they will also have to log into Facebook. On the first time they also have to authenticate my application.
I am a little surprised that they have to actually log into Facebook each time they want to use any Facebook features from inside my app.
Isn't there a way to authenticate once, then I can store a token and this would allow me to access Facebook on their behalf in the future (until they de-authorize) without them having to log into Facebook each and every time?
This just seems very cumbersome.
Request the user for offline_access permissions using the scope argument in the authorization request
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/#requesting-extended-permissions
You can use the session key returned, save it and use it until it expires (this usually is very long) or until the user revokes access to your application
Here is the full list of extended permissions your application can ask for http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions