Fetching friends' birthdays from facebook profile - facebook

Question

I want to fetch 'birthdays' of users, and their friends on my website, from their facebook profiles (with their facebook credentials supplied).
Is their a feature in Facebook API/Connect that I can use to fetch these details from facebook as possible on Native Facebook Apps using Facebook API.
I want to store this data in my DB, and users will be asked for their facebook credentials and consent before this is done.

Answer 1

Read the api documentation things like this are easily done. You can do it like this:
$facebook = new Facebook( $apikey, $secret );
$uid = $facebook->require_login();
$friends = $facebook->api_client->friends_get(); // $friends is an array holding the user ids of your friends
foreach( $friends as $f ) {
$data = $facebook->api_client->fql_query( "SELECT birthday_date FROM user WHERE uid=$f" );
// $data[0] is an array with 'birthday_date' => "02/29/1904"
// see api documentation for other fields and do a print_r
}

Answer 2

So recently I wanted to check my friends to see if any of them had their birthday for the current day. Using FQL this is super easy and I encourage you to explore FQL more because it will yield a more efficient solution than, say, what Pierre kindly offered. Here is a small snippet of the code:
$friends = $facebook->api_client->friends_get();
$uids = "";
foreach($friends as $f) {
$uids .= "uid=$f OR ";
}
$query_uids = substr($uids,0,strlen($query_uids)-4);
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
$current_date = date("m/d");
echo "<br />Searching for birthdays for the given month/day: $current_date<br />";
$data = $facebook->api_client->fql_query( "SELECT name, uid FROM user WHERE ( ($query_uids) AND strpos(birthday_date,'$current_date') >= 0 )" );
if(count($data) > 0) {
foreach($data as $d) {
print_r($d);
}
} else {
echo "<br />No Birthdays Today<br />";
}

Answer 3

require_once('facebook-platform/client/facebook.php');
$facebook = new Facebook(API_KEY, SECRET);
$facebook->require_login();
function getInfo($user_list, $fields)
{
try
{
$u = $facebook->api_client->users_getInfo($user_list, $fields);
return $u;
}
catch (FacebookRestClientException $e)
{
echo $e->getCode() . ' ' . $e->getMessage();
}
}
function getFriendsBirthdays($user_id)
{
$f = $_REQUEST['fb_sig_friends'];
$f = explode(',', $f);
$birthdays = array();
foreach($f as $friend_id)
{
$birthdays[] = getInfo($friend_id, 'birthday');
}
return $birthdays;
}
Do something like that or use the Batch API to do multiple calls at once. Check the Facebook API.

Answer 4

You could fetch it via the API, but Facebook's terms strictly forbid you from storing anything other than their user ID in your database - see the developer wiki for details. You will need to query the API each time.