Book Image

Flash Facebook Cookbook

By : James Ford
Book Image

Flash Facebook Cookbook

By: James Ford

Overview of this book

Flash applications are popular and becoming increasingly social. With flash applications for facebook you can tap into a potential audience of half a billion existing users, their connections and affiliations, their uploaded images, posts, comments and more.The Flash Facebook Cookbook is packed with recipes for the Graph API and FQL, used for reading and writing data as well as interacting with Facebook anonymously or on behalf of an authorised Facebook User.The topics covered by the recipes in this Cookbook include working with News feeds, uploading Photos, searching for and plotting Places on a map and much more. The cookbook has recipes ranging from those that work without any authentication with Facebook to those that do, and act on behalf of a user. Packed with recipes that yield practical demonstrations of the Graph API functionality, the Flash Facebook Cookbook is an essential tool for Flash Platform developers.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Flash Facebook Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
10
Checkins and Facebook Places

Loading specific data fields for a Graph API object


When we request an object from the Graph API, without explicitly specifying the data fields we're interested in, we receive a default set of properties for that object, properties which are determined by Facebook.

Alternatively, we can improve the efficiency of our requests by explicitly listing the data fields we're interested in, and the API will only return those properties.

For example, were we seeking information about user's birthdays, rather than loading all of the user's information—including their name, gender, and locale—with each request, we could specify that we only want to load that user's birthday information, via the birthday data field.

Specifying data fields in this manner obviously doesn't give us access to information that a user hasn't supplied, and it doesn't bypass any privacy restrictions that the user has set up for their data, but it does ensure that responses from the Graph API will return that information if it...