Facebook_Graph_API

0.0.4 • Public • Published

Facebook Call API 0.0.4

Purpose

There's likely other perfectly good modules out there to fetch data from the Facebook Graph. But I wanted to make a module that is quick and easy, allowing for rapid development.

Important! This is an extremely early version. Not all of the request types are fully tested. YMMV

Installing

The easiest way to install is via npm

npm install Facebook_Graph_API

Making Requests

You can make requests to the following:

accounts, achievements, activities, adaccounts, albums, apprequests, books, checkins, comments, events, family, feed, friendlists, friendrequests, friends, games, groups, home, inbox, insights, interests, likes, links, movies, music, mutualfriends, notes, notifications, outbox, payments, permissions, photos, picture, posts, questions, search, scores, statuses, subscribers, subscriptions, tagged, television, threads, updates, user, videos

Most of these are documented on Facebook's Developers Page.

Making a request looks something like:

var facebookGraphApi = require('facebook-graph-api')
var graph = new facebookGraphApi()
 
graph.likes('user_id', 'access_token', function(err, response, body, paging) {
    console.dir(body)
})

If you need to pass an option like limit or fields then pass them as an {} object, just before the callback.

graph.likes('user_id', 'access_token', {
    limit: 10,
    fields: [ 'id', 'name' ]
}, function(err, response, body, paging) {
    console.dir(body)
})

The response will be the full request response. If Facebook returns json in the request, then body will be the json object. Otherwise body will be whatever they return (possibly a string).

The last parameter, paging, may contain next or previous. If available, you can call these with a callback. An example of this is given below.

The user request is equivalent to a graph request to /me/. It returns information like name, birthday, location, et cetera.

Using the User object

If you plan to make multiple requests for a given user, or simiply want an object that stores the returning data, then you can make a user object. There are two ways to do this.

var facebookGraphApi = require('facebook-graph-api')
var graph = new facebookGraphApi()
var facebookUser
 
facebookUser = new graph.User('user_id', 'access_token')
 
// is equivalent to
 
facebookUser = new facebookGraphApi.User('user_id', 'access_token')

Now you can make the same requests avaiable in graph, as shown above, but with a User instance you only need to pass the callback.

facebookUser.likes(function(err, response, body, paging) {
    console.dir(body)
})

The callback receives the same arguments as the previous example. Though, in this case, the data returned is also stored in facebookUser.data. If you make a likes request, then the data from the call will be stored in facebookUser.data.likes.

facebookUser.likes(function(err, response, body, paging) {
    console.dir(body)
 
    // is equivalent to
 
    console.dir(facebookUser.data.likes)
})

Additionally, you can fire off a number of asynchronous requests, with a callback that will be fired when all are returned. But, in this case, the callback will receieve an error (if there was one) and the facebookUser object. Note that if more than one error resulting from the multiple requests, then you will only receive the first that was returned.

Paging isn't available from a get.

facebookUser.get(['likes', 'feed', 'friends'], function(err, facebookUser) {
    console.dir(facebookUser.data)
})

Also, similar to other requests, you can send an options object.

facebookUser.get(['likes', 'feed', 'friends'], { limit: 1000 }, function(err, facebookUser) {
    console.dir(facebookUser.data)
})

Paging

The last parameter sent to callbacks is paging, which may contain next or previous. If available, these functions can be called with a callback to trigger another request, of the same critera, with the new callback.

The following example will request a user's posts, from day one. And will stop after the fourth next.

Note that in this example we pass a native date to since. Facebook actually takes dates in seconds, not milliseconds, and this module will adjust date object to make them work.

Also, we may only get one or two next functions. Or none at all. Hence the check for paging.next.

var i = 0
 
var callback = function(err, response, body, paging) {
    i++
    console.log('Callback #' + i)
 
    if (> 5 && paging.next) {
        return paging.next(callback)
    }
 
    console.dir(facebookUser.data.posts)
}
 
var fbLaunched = new Date(Date.parse('February 4, 2004'))
 
facebookUser.posts({ since: fbLaunched }, callback)

Searching

Facebook offers ways to search both public data (like posts, places, et cetera) as well as a user's own data.

Searching public data is achieved by calling the search method.

graph.search('user_id', 'access_token', {
    q: 'today',
    type: 'post'
}, function(err, response, body, paging) {
    console.dir(body)
})
 
// is equivalent to
 
User.search({
    q: 'election',
    type: 'today'
}, function(err, response, body, paging) {
    console.dir(body)
})

The search on graph and User both search public data on Facebook. If you want to search a user's own posts (or other data), you'd have to do something like this:

graph.posts('user_id', 'access_token', {
    q: 'fridge'
}, function(err, response, body, paging) {
    console.dir(body)
})
 
// is equivalent to
 
User.posts({
    q: 'fridge'
}, function(err, response, body, paging) {
    console.dir(body)
})

Note that on some public searches you don't need an auth key. Unlike other methods, the graph.search method allows you to ommit the user id and auth key.

// this will work
graph.search({
    q: 'purple',
    type: 'post'
}, function(err, response, body, paging) {
    console.dir(body)
})
 
// this will fail, since facebook requires an auth key for this type of search
graph.search({
    q: 'purple',
    type: 'place'
}, function(err, response, body, paging) {
    console.dir(body)
})

Also worth mentioning is that the query string q will not be restricted to exact matches. Facebook matches against case-insensitive tokens. And Facebook does not ensure that tokens are not part of a word. So if you search for what a day it may yield a post message like Day one and I don't know what I'm doing.

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npm i Facebook_Graph_API

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0.0.4

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  • tmarshall