You can integrate Facebook Connect in your iPhone application to interact with Facebook and perform operations like updating status, posting link etc.
To post status update to Facebook, you require extended permissions. To get extended permissions Facebook Connect shows a dialog for authentication (with username and password field).
I want to use my custom view to get Facebook username and password just once and store it in a local database (or NSUserDefaults), so that i can use these credentials to perform operations like updating status and posting link without showing the authentication dialog ever again - even when user quit's and relaunches the application the next day.
Can i bypass the built-in Permissions Dialog and perform the
operations like posting the status and
posting links to Facebook in the
background?
Authenticate using pre-saved credentials, and on success
Update Facebook status
I can do that with Twitter. It doesn't require me to show any authentication/permissions dialog to authenticate before posting the tweets.
Any ideas? Thanks.
Note: Editted the post to make it clear.
You cannot store the user's email and password. This is a violation of the terms of use as Noah mentioned.
What you can do is prompt the user once logged in for the offline_access and publish_stream extended permissions which will stop their session from expiring.
This means you can store the session key in your database along with the uid and will have the ability to perform certain actions without the user having to be logged in.
I wouldn't recommend it. Probably a violation of the API's terms of use.
Related
I am trying to have a custom facebook login page in my react meteor app. For example, I have my custom input fields (username and password) and I am trying to pass username/password values to facebook and validate. I do not want to use meteor account-ui. I found Meteor.loginWithFacebook which only checks to see if user is ALREADY logged in. Can someone help me to understand how I can use my custom username/password fields to get facebook user data?
Answer: That is not doable (or at least, should not be done, even if some workaround or hack exists, which I am unaware of).
What you can do is create your own authentication system, and give the user the option of either filling in the user details themselves, or using facebook login to fetch it from facebook. That ways, you have your own authentication, and also user's facebook profile.
Explanation:
The whole point of having openid (facebook, twitter, gmail, etc authentication) is to make signing up for a website/app convenient and SECURE.
If you use your custom user name and password field, then you can even store them, and that can give you access to user's facebook account. Even if you were not to do that, someone can easily hack into your website and steal the data to get access to your user's facebook account (your application would be way easier to hack into compared to facebook).
Hence, the facebook login api is such that the very sensitive task of accepting user name, password (facebook would never trust anyone else to do that for it), and validation of user is done by facebook, and you are given a token which tells you the user is logged in, and his basic profile (if you ask for it), and you do not have to worry about security, and the user himself feels safe, because he knows he is typing his user name and password in facebook.com, and not in somexyz.com
I have an application which asks for a registration through facebook but before a user can proceed to the registration, the system should first determine if there is an active session. If a user is logged in to facebook, it should then automatically logout for a fresh start.
But here is where I'm stuck. The SDKs only let the user log out from facebook if he is connected to your app. It uses the app's access token. But what if he is still not registered to your app? Their log out means to log out from your app, and not really from facebook.
My requirement :
1. How can i log out from facebook.
2. How can i clear the browser cookies?
Not on a specific app but the whole facebook session.
[from comments] But to use the getLogoutUrl() function, the user has to be connected to your app. What I need is to logout from the whole facebook and not just from the app
If the user is connected to your app, then the URL provided by the getLogoutUrl method does that – log the user out of your app (web-app) and out of facebook.com.
If the user is not connected to your app however, you don’t have an active user access token – and then logging out of Facebook is not possible. The obvious reason being that if it was, every website that I visit could log me out of Facebook in a “drive-by” manner – without me actively wanting that, so people would get annoyed quite quickly.
If a user is logged in to facebook, it should then automatically logout for a fresh start.
If this is a security consideration, then you are in fact looking for re-authentication, which can be done using the auth_type parameter, quote from docs:
In apps where security is very important, you may want to double-check someone's identity - perhaps before they make a purchase within the app, or use it to access some sensitive personal data.
To prevent situations where a user could leave a device logged in or man-in-the-middle hijacking of the user session, re-authentication forces a person to re-enter their Facebook password before they can continue to use your app.
Be aware to use the server-side Auth flow though – because in the client-side flow, using the JS SDK, there is a bug that allows the user to bypass re-entering his password by simply closing the popup, which is still open: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/248632218597467 (Has been assigned Priority: High, but received still nothing more than a “we will follow up” response yet.)
Use the logout.php url.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/php/facebook-getLogoutUrl/
Basically,
http://facebook.com/logout.php?next=YOUR_NEXT_URL_FOR_LOGOUT&access_token=USER_TOKEN
1) logging out from facebook by using
facebook=>getLogoutUrl();
2) clearing the session by using :
$facebook->destroySession();
example:
Log Out
logout.php page codes as follow:
<?php
require 'facebook.php';
$facebook->destroySession();
header( "location:index.php" );
?>
I'm trying to implement facebook connect to my website, and i have couple questions.
1: Is it possible to register user in my website using his current facebook email/password.
Let's say user clicks on link Register via facebook and then he have to give me permisions to access his password, email, etc... and after that is done i put that info in my own database and he will be able to login with that account any time he wants without needing to give me permisions any time in the future.
2: If that kind of registration is not possible, what's other solution would be the best for me? Because i need to somehow keep track of that user who logged in with facebook, because he can upload photos, send messages etc.
Anyways, i'm quite new with facebook and similar things, so i'm really lost here, hope some one can help me :)
EDIT Thank you all for wonderful answers it helped me a lot, now all that's left is to read documentation :)
Yes it is, it is possible to get the information of the user. But it is rather complicated, when you have never dealt with it.
First you need to send the user to the following link:
https://m.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=your-client-id&redirect_uri=xxx&scope=listof-information-you-want
Facebook will then return your client to the uri specified, if the user rejected it will give a reason. If it is not you will get an code in urlencoded format.
This code is needed for the following step, the request of the access token:
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?redirect_uri=xxx&client_id=xxx&client_secret=xxx&code=xxxx
This will give back an access token, if the authorization didn't fail.
After that you can ask for the information you want:
https://graph.facebook.com/me?method=GET&metadata=true&format=json&access_token=access_token
This will include a facebook uid, which is unique for all users. Store it and you can discern between a register and login.
This is roughly the process for any oauth2 application.
Facebook will not ask repeatedly for permissions after the user granted them to you. So you can store the access token and reuse it for backend stuff and also use the same procedure you use for register for login.
You can never access the user's password from Facebook even with his/her permission, so the user will always have to authenticate via Facebook and have Facebook pass you the user id of the logged in user once authentication succeeds. You can store all kinds of other data locally, but not enough to authenticate the user yourself.
Once the user is authenticated, you'll have access to the user's Facebook user id via the API, which should be enough to connect all kinds of information to that specific user.
Facebook does not provide access to accounts when passwords are taken from your controls. It provides it own canvas for login information. Therefore you cannot use your first approach to store passwords in your databases. Check this out.
You can however store email addresses once user logins into his account using the facebook sdks. Check this out link for the example of C# SDK sample code.
You can use the Facebook APIs to fetch user email-id, photos, friendslist and other information and then play around accordingly.
You don't get access to the users password - only email if you ask for it.
Best way would be to have a table of users and their Facebook account id's.
If you want to allow users to sign up without Facebook then have a nullable field for their password and facebook id, and also have a field for username - which you could populate from Facebook if they register via that route.
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.
I have a mysql membership database run by a Perl script. Account creation or login requires an email address and password. The Perl script then sets cookies (password cookie has encrypted value) which allow users to create, own and modify records. A members table contains user information. I've gone through the FacebookConnect information as well as the forum. Maybe I cannot see the forest for the trees, or maybe this is not possible. In order to use FacebookConnect for logins/account creation, I need to be able to send the user email and password to the the Perl script so that the proper cookies are set. If it were an http it would look like this:
http://domain.com/cgi-bin/perlscript.pl?_cgifunction=login&email=ddd#somedomain.com&password=somepassword.
Any hints or advice would be greatly appreciated.
What you are trying to do isn't really possible in the way that you're describing it.
Facebook Connect basically provides you with a single piece of information: whether your visitor is logged in to their Facebook account or not. If they are, you can get their Facebook ID, if not, you can show them a button (or whatever) and ask them to log into Facebook.
Generally a good approach when using Facebook Connect as an authentication method for your site is to have an internal id for the user's member account, and store a user's Facebook ID alongside that. When a user comes to your site, and they are already logged in to Facebook, you just use their Facebook ID to retrieve the local account. Otherwise you show them your login form to log in locally, and/or a Facebook login button.
The problem you're running into here is that you cannot get someone's email address from Facebook, as it is purposely hidden to protect privacy. If your membership scripts provide only the email/password log-in method, then what you need to do is modify these scripts to create the authentication cookie when given a properly authenticated Facebook ID.
Essentially you'll have two login functions... one for a Facebook login, and one for a regular login. Either function should properly created the local authentication cookie.