Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook

Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook

By : Shashwat Srivastava, Apeksha Singh

Buy this Book

Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook

By: Shashwat Srivastava, Apeksha Singh

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

With a user base of nearly 800 million people, Facebook is the number one social networking platform. Applications can be created to interact with this huge user base in various ways both inside and outside Facebook. These applications, if developed effectively and efficiently, offer a free medium for promotion and publicity of a product or an organization. Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook covers both the concepts and implementations necessary to develop Facebook applications and provides ready to use code for common scenarios faced by a developer while creating these applications. It incorporates the newly launched Facebook Graph API and also presents the reader with some intuitive ready to use applications. This book guides the reader step by step, from start to finish, through various stages of Facebook application development. It begins by exploring the Facebook application registration and discussing the verification and authentication technique. It then takes you through the various ways in which you can use Facebook Graph API for interacting with users such as posting on a user’s wall, tagging a user in a picture, etc. Accessing complex Facebook user data by formulating a series of queries, doing client side scripting and incorporating Facebook Dialog interface are some other features that have been incorporated in this book. Integration of various Facebook Social Plugins such as the like box in your web page has also been discussed. Further you will get to know the concept of virtual currency and how to programmatically derive Facebook analytics data. As the book progresses, you will learn to use and integrate many more advanced features in Facebook application development. The book contains ready to use code that can be deployed instantly. Towards the end, the book houses a variety of ready to use Facebook applications so as to help readers derive their own applications from them.

Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Creating a New Facebook Application

Introduction

Downloading PHP-SDK and setting upyour environment

Registering a new Facebook application

Configuring a Facebook application

Getting authorization and a valid session for the user

Requesting specific permissions from the user

Logging out a user

Handling navigation in an iFrame Facebook application

Handling form submission in an iFrame Facebook application

Dynamically resizing an iFrame Facebook application

Determining whether a Facebook page has been liked by a user

Be a part of Social Graph

Introduction

Retrieving a user's information

Liking a post

Commenting on a given post

Setting status message

Deleting a picture, post, or comment of a user

Retrieving the current user's friendlist

Creating a post on the wall of a user's friend

Posting a picture to a specific album of the user

Retrieving the names of the user's friends who have liked a particular status message

Creating an event

Paging through a user's friends

Searching through a user's feed

Tagging users in a picture

Adding a subscription for real time updates related to a user object

Creating a callback for handling real time updates

Deleting subscriptions

Querying Facebook

Introduction

Returning information about a user

Getting the status messages of a user

Retrieving profile pictures of a user's friends

Getting the links posted by a user

Getting the Facebook pages followed by a user

Determining if two users are friends

Retrieving information of a group

Retrieving members of a group

Retrieving friends from a specific friend list

Getting all the messages in a thread

Checking the status of permissions for an application

Getting notifications, and their senders, for the current user

Retrieving video details associated with a user

Getting the five latest photos in which a user has been tagged

Retrieving the latest photos published by a user

Retrieving details of an event

Retrieving details of a user's friends by using the multiquery method

Using FB Script

Introduction

Getting the current user status and performing session validation

Setting up extended permissions during login

Logging out a user

Resetting the size of iframe

Making a Graph API call

Executing an FQL query

Subscribing to an event change

Unsubscribing to an event change

Retrieving a profile picture using XFBML

Adding bookmarks using XFBML

Authentication and setting up extended permissions using XFBML

Expressing Yourself

Introduction

Prompting the user to publish a story

Using Dialog to add someone as a friend

Using the OAuth Dialog to request permissions for your application

Prompting the user to send a request to friends

Processing requests sent to the user by friends

Bringing Facebook to your Website

Introduction

Setting up the Like button on your web page

Adding a Like box

Setting up the Activity Feed plugin

Setting up the Facepile plugin on your web page

Integrating the Live Stream plugin using XFBML

Integrating the Comment box using XFBML

Integrating the Send button using XFBML

Connecting Websites to the Social Graph

Introduction

Integrating web pages into the social graph

Integrating audio and video data

Administering your page

Publishing stream updates to the users

Fiddling with Virtual Currency

Introduction

Setting up the application for Facebook Credits

Setting up an application callback for Facebook Credits

Creating Facebook Credits frontend using JavaScript SDK

Getting the order details

Implementing custom offers

Refunding the order

Developing a "Send a Gift" application and integrating with Facebook Credits

Creating Advertisements and Analyzing Metric Data

Introduction

Retrieving impressions of the Like Box plugin

Retrieving a page's stream views and wall posts using batch request

Getting the number of installations of an application using FQL

Getting statistics about visitors using FQL multiquery

Creating a new ad for your Facebook application

Creating Instant Applications

Introduction

Creating a "Your Good Luck Charm of the Day" Facebook application

Designing a "My Fast Friends" Facebook application

Setting up a photo collage

Building a birthday calendar

Developing an application to classify friends according to the cities they live in

Using Facebook Open Graph Beta

Introduction

Setting up your application for using Facebook Open Graph Beta

Defining actions, objects, and aggregations for your application

Customizing the Facebook Auth Dialog box

Requesting permission for publishing to the user's timeline

Defining your web page as a Facebook graph object

Publishing actions of a user to Facebook

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Making a Graph API call

We can make Graph API calls to the Facebook server through the JavaScript SDK. This allows us to build dynamic applications, which can load data directly from Facebook servers to the user's browser. This improves performance tremendously, in comparison to making all calls from your server, as all processing and rendering is done on the client side.

Getting ready

You should have set up index.php as explained in the beginning of this chapter.

How to do it...

The following steps will describe a Graph API call:

Open index.php and add the following code to it just below the FB.init() function. Specify the content to be posted:
```
var text = 'This content is posted via the JS SDK';
```

Make a Graph API call using the FB.api() function:

FB.api('/me/feed', 'post', { message: text },function(response) {
  if (!response || response.error) {
    alert('Error occured');
  } else {
    alert('Post ID is ' + response.id);
  }
});

Save and run the file. An alert box will be displayed as shown in...

Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook

By : Shashwat Srivastava, Apeksha Singh

Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook

By: Shashwat Srivastava, Apeksha Singh

Overview of this book

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Current Title:

Facebook Application Development with Graph API Cookbook

Making a Graph API call

Getting ready

How to do it...