I have a Facebook iframe app that runs on various Facebook pages. I can create a link directly to my app with the following hyperlink:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/PAGE-NAME/PAGE-ID?sk=app_APP-ID
where PAGE-NAME, PAGE-ID, and APP-ID are populated with their corresponding variables.
Is there a way to link to my app if I don't know the PAGE-NAME, and only know PAGE-ID and my APP-ID?
I can link to the page without knowing the PAGE-NAME using the following hyperlink:
www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=PAGE-ID
However I can't seem to find a way to link to my app's iframe on the page. I've tried these 2 links but they don't work either:
www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=PAGE-ID&sk=app_APP-ID
www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=PAGE-ID&v=app_APP-ID
http://graph.facebook.com/PAGE_ID
json_decode that, get the LINK field.
append your
?sk=app_APP-ID
Related
The original method for sharing links with a custom image, text and link appears to have been stripped from Facebook. I for one would love to see them bring this back.
Here is my situtation. I have a Facebook tab that loads a page that is hosted under my hosteddomains.com. I setup a Facebook app to work with my Facebook tab. When I try to use the new "Share Dialog" if the link I want to share is not the same as the app domains then i get an error and I can't share the link. Am I doing something wrong or is this what they intended to do?
IF that's what they intended to do then there is no way that this will replace what sharer.php could do. I could be on any site and share any link with an image to Facebook and have it posted to my wall.
The question is if i am on facebook tab and i want to share a link (I want a dialog box with a custom photo, title, link, and summary) and allow my users to post this custom message to there Facebook status.
Maybe i am confused about how to accomplish this, but so far i am not having much luck.
I miss the good ole days when i could just construct a URL and that would give me the ability to share what i want to share. Twitter and Pinterest have these methods.
Here are some code examples of things that I've tried that did not work:
Option #1:
The url in this option goes to page that I created on hosteddomains.com that has the Open Graph Meta Tags in it. My idea was to share these pages from my server that will direct them back to my Facebook tab. The result I was getting from this method was seeing the title of the tab from my FB page and description. The reason turned out to be that if i set the og:url to my Facebook tab page, that's the page that would get scraped. That's not what i was expecting from this method. I thought it would take the meta tags from the page i shared and the url with it. Not take all of the info from url and ignore the meta tags.
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=[URL]"
target="_parent">SHARE ON FB</a></p>
Option #2:
Tried using Facebook Share Dialog. I had an interesting time with this one. I setup a new Facebook app. I tried the Facebook tab as the URL and also my custom url to the page that has custom open graph meta tags. The facebook app has two App Domains - hosteddomain.com and websiteA.com. I also created a Page Tab section. The page tab section loads the HTML page that was loaded in the tab we made for our facebook page. Issue with this method is I don't get a custom open graph options set from my php page. I'm picking up information from the facebook tab again. At least now the dialog box shows the name of the new app. I am limited in what i can share using this method. The url i share has to belong to the App Domains. In order to have multiple app domains, I had to make that Page Tab section and then add the second url to the App Domains field, otherwise i got a warning.
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/dialog/share?app_id=[appID]&display=popup&href=[url]
&redirect_uri=[url]&ref=s" target="_blank">SHARE THIS</a>
Option #3
The last thing I tried was the fb-share-button using the Javascript SDK. I get the same result as option #1. I don't think there is much difference between these two. Option 3 here is a bit easier to deal with and cleaner code. In this example, the url is to my custom page on hosteddomains.com that has my custom open graph meta tags. That doesnt seem to matter though. It still pulls the info from the og:url meta tag. I tried removing the og:url meta tag. I get the same result. Is it the Page Tab info interfering?
<div class="fb-share-button" data-href="[url]"></div>
I'm working on a photo contest fb app to run in a fan page tab. the user should be able to share the photo in order for others to vote for them.
supposing image link in iframe is http://example.com/image.php?id=1 for particular photo, pressing share will share this link through iframe. which leads up to the host app itself.
what I need is sharing the whole fb app tab page url with http://example.com/image.php?id=1 open in its Iframe.
is that possible in any way?
thanks for help.
So to give the “alternative” to #Lix’ answer, which focuses on canvas apps, here the analog way for page tab apps:
For some reason Facebook decided to do things differently for page tab apps – different than with canvas apps, you can not pass just any GET parameters to your app by appending them to the facebook.com address of your app, but you have to use the app_data parameter for that.
You call/link to your app in the form https://www.facebook.com/YourPage?v=app_1234567890&app_data=foo – and whatever you put as value for the parameter app_data, you will find in the signed_request parameter that Facebook POSTs to your app on initial(!) load into the iframe.
So you parse the signed_request (or let f.e. the PHP SDK do that for you), and then you find the app_data value in there. If you want to pass more than one single value, you can f.e. also put JSON-encoded data there – then you have to decode that again after you read the app_data value from the signed request.
The docs just shortly mention the app_data parameter, but the principle itself is quite simple.
Now, when it comes to sharing those links, I found that when you use an address in the above form, Facebook tends to cut the parameters from the URL, and treat the whole link as just a link to your Facebook page – it shows the page’s picture and description, and does not even pass your page tab app along, let alone the app_data parameter.
I found the most reliable way around this is not to link to your page tab on Facebook directly, but instead to a URL of your own app. When the scraper visits it, you deliver the relevant OG information. And when it’s a real user visiting, you redirect them to your page tab app, passing the data you need via the app_data parameter as described above. Redirecting can either be done server-side (info on how to detect the scraper server-side via its User-Agent header), or client-side via JavaScript (which the scraper does not “speak”).
Sure it is. All you have to do is be able to extract the information from your application canvas URL. If your canvas URL is something like this:
https://apps.facebook.com/ImadBakir
Then you could place some more info in there, like this:
https://apps.facebook.com/ImadBakir?photo_id=123
Users will share that link and now in your application, you can parse that photo_id parameter and make the needed HTML changes to display the correct image inside your iframe as the page and application loads.
With regard to parsing the the URL parameters, assuming you'll be doing it with JavaScript, you can read more about it in this post:
How can I get query string values in JavaScript?
I want a Like button on my web site that Likes my Facebook profile (rather than my web page), so that when a user clicks it they subscribe to my Facebook posts.
I've created the Like button using the tool at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
Further down that page there is an FAQ entry:
Can I link the Like button to my Facebook page?
Yes. Simply specify the URL of your Facebook page in the href
parameter of the button.
So, I've edited the href parameter to point to my Facebook page. eg:
https://www.facebook.com/myfacebookid
When a user clicks the Like button it has the desired effect. The user ends up having Liked my Facebook page. This is easily verified by the user going to my Facebook profile and checking that the Like button has changed to Liked.
But. When the user clicks the Like button, and entry appears in their News Feed with a generic Facebook description. ie:
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and
others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to
keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links
and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
I don't want a generic post about Facebook to appear. I want the description to relate to my Facebook account and/or web site.
Normally, I could modify this behavior with the Opengraph og: description tag, but as the page in the href is a Facebook page and not my own, I can't control the Opengraph tags.
I'm pretty sure that this was working okay before I enabled timeline for my account, so maybe this is a timeline bug?
So, how do I add a Like button which a) Likes my Facebook profile rather than one of my own web pages, and b) Posts a description of my Facebook profile rather than give a generic Facbook description?
Are all your fields in the info part of your page filled in, and/or completed? I just tested your theory and it seemed to work as expected, only thing is I know all fields in "info" are filled it. Give that a try.
This may happen if you have filled invalid/incomplete/wrong og tags in past and later changed them. Facebook's cache creates problem sometime.
Try putting all the entries (i.e. all og tags) and then debug them here http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. This debugger gives a detailed info about the url with og tags and also clears the cache for you.
This should solve the problem.
You have 3 important fields that used on page opengraph: Name,Description,Profile Image.
They are used when some one post your link on Facebook, or Google or some else web service that handle opengraph.
Actually, the suggested answers currently do not work and there is an open bug / ticket on Facebook for it. Up to now, there's no fix.
The problem is that you can not use simply https://www.facebook.com/myfacebookid. You should copy and paste the exact page URL. If you have a low number of likes it would look something like https://www.facebook.com/pages/[YourPageName]/[Your page Id]/, and this is the URL that you should use at this point.
If it does not work, try also https://www.facebook.com/[YourPageName]/[Your page Id]/.
In short, copy-paste the URL, do not type it manually.
We are working on a facebook-app with lots of dynamic pages. As the app is embedded in a tab on a facebook page, the urls contain a get-parameter to address the correct tab/app. We want to implement like- and send-buttons for several pages within our app, but facebook seems to dump all get-parameters from urls within facebook. As the result all like- and send-buttons point to the facebook-page itself instead of the tab.
Does anybody now any workaround? We already tried redirects via an external sefor facebook urls only.rver but facebook seems to evaluate the links on click of the like-/send-button (and seems to follow all sort of redirects).
UPDATE:
Here is an example of a problematic url:
https://www.facebook.com/smartmobil.de?sk=app_171502639574871
UPDATE:
The problem seems to be independant of url get-parameters. It seems that the like-button does not work with any url starting with www.facebook.com
When used in a like-button everything behind the ? will be dumped. This seems to happen for facebook urls only.
Best workaround so far is to point your like buttons at external (non-facebook canvas) urls.
To make this work, you need to do some conditional redirecting to get the user back into your canvas URL. You can either use a client side javascript redirect:
<script>
window.location = 'http://apps.facebook.com/yourcanvasname/foo/bar';
</script>
Or you can do a server side redirect based on the useragent string. Basically, if the useragent contains 'facebookexternalhit' then render a basic HTML page containing OG tags, if not, redirect to the canvas URL.
Doing this means the Facebook sharescraper/linter won't follow any redirects back to the canvas URL, but any user that arrives at your URL will get back to Canvas.
i'm too searching for a solution to control the custom page tab's content through a get parameter (app_data). I still don't have a solution but here at least the reason why all www.facebook.com links are srtiped out of get params. Here at bottom the developer explains why.
Unfortunately I don't think what you are trying to do is possible. Posting a like programmatically requires you to specify a Facebook content ID or alias. This won't work for you because tabs to not seem to have an exposed content ID of their own, and instead use the Page's content ID with an additional parameter which you can't use with the graph.
Liking external links and other content that does not have an ID programmatically is prohibited. With an external URL, the first like of an unrecognised URL creates a new Facebook page for those likes to be represented on (which is the issue I've given up trying to fight), but presumably the presence of your Page's content ID alias (www.facebook.com/smartmobil.de) in the url is making Facebook choose you page rather than creating a new one.
The only suggestion I can think of this late at night is to target an external URL that performs a redirect via Javascript, rather than on the server, but Facebook may be wise to that too and I'm afraid I'm going to bed rather than testing it :)
I'm trying to add a facebook "like" button to my page, and it is appearing just fine. My problem is that once it is clicked by a user, it says "Like NUMBER" then resets as if the request was canceled or something.
The weird thing is that if I try to like a page using my facebook account it works, but I tried letting a friend like some content and this behavior appeared.
I created a facebook app, specified the site url with a trailing slash, and site domain. I used the app ID with FB.init, and with the open graph tags. I can't figure what I'm doing wrong here. Any help would be appreciated.
Sample page can be found at: http://wiseolive.com/en/doctors/3881-khalid-jamal-salaymeh
First, for the count to work correctly, Facebook needs to have access to the page (in other words a public page). Check your URL in the linter tool (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) to ensure it can been seen by Facebook.
Secondly, ensure your og: tags are correctly setup. Once again, you can use the linter tool to do that.
Facebook like buttons will show this behavior until they have been scraped by Facebook. That scraping (facebook like docs) will occur every 24 hours, when an admin clicks the like button or the url is put in the url debugger/linter. From what I can tell doing that will solve the problem for that specific link, but not any others you may have on your site.
I don't know of a generic solution for dynamically generated pages unfortunately.