How can I retrieve the user access token programatically? I want to refresh the token before it expires through program. How do I achieve this using facebook4j or spring social facebook?
Refreshing tokens is only possible on user interaction. There is no way to do that programmatically, the whole point of short living tokens is that it´s NOT possible to just get a new one without user interaction.
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I am trying to get data from public pages of facebook using graph api.
This requires acess tokens.But I want to automate the process such that I get the data after ever day but the tokens expire after some time. Is there any method to get the acess tokens programatically to automate this thing ?
Also why it acess tokens are required for public pages ?
The only Token you get without user interaction is an App Access Token. It´s basically "App-ID|App-Secret" (with a pipe sign). This works as long as the Page is not restricted by age or location. In that case, you would need to use a User or Page Token, because Facebook can´t identify a User (and his age or location) with an App Token.
You can also use an Extended Page Token, which is valid forever. But you have to be Admin of the Page for that one.
More information about Tokens:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens
http://www.devils-heaven.com/facebook-access-tokens/
If you want to know why Tokens are needed, you need to ask Facebook.
I have an application, that runs on server. On that server is background task, that will post status update on few social networks (Facebook, Twitter, G+). It must be completely server-side.
In Twitter API I'm able to use OAuth header to authorize API request. OAuth HTTP header uses consumer key, consumer secret, access token and access token secret to create the header. With this I'm able to post/update/delete tweets with no user interaction.
How can I do this for Facebook? I found a solution to obtain a long-lived access_token (2 months), but we don't want to regenerate access_token every 60 days. We want to use it for manage our Facebook page - post status updates, but completely server-side.
Am I able to do this for Facebook? Thanks for answers.
PS: I searched stackoverflow hundred-times but with no solution for my problem.
Thanks.
It is not possible for User Access Tokens (they can only be extended to 60 days and need to be refreshed by the user after that), but for posting to a Page you should use a Page Token anyway. An Extended Page Token is valid forever.
Here are some Links to help you get that Extended Page Token:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens/
http://www.devils-heaven.com/facebook-access-tokens/
http://www.devils-heaven.com/extended-page-access-tokens-curl/
A Page Token will post "as Page" btw, but that´s probably what you want. And auto-posting on user profiles is not really allowed anyway, every message has to be 100% user generated and every posting should get authorized by the user.
Pay attention to Access Tokens Expiration & Extentions.
The Page Access Token could be a good solution to only server side calls for testing and data analysis purposes.
Take your User Access Token from Graph API Tool
Extend your User Access Token
Call https://graph.facebook.com/v2.11/me/accounts with your user access token extended
*all calls are GET and this procedure does not use APP Access Token.
The application which I am building maps a user_id to multiple facebook accounts. I have access tokens for each of these mapped accounts and everything works nicely. There is a problem, though, when one of these access tokens expires but the user is logged in to Facebook as a different user than the one to whom the expired access token belongs.
I read all there is about obtaining a new access token for the currently logged in user but I found nothing about the case when the user whose access token expired is not logged in to Facebook.
I would appreciate your thoughts and possible solutions.
Users can't have multiple Facebook accounts, so that part of your question doesn't entirely make sense, but in general, if an access token expires you need the user to come back to your app and go through the Authentication flow again, which will give you a new access token for that user
I believe the only way to get an updated access token would be to go through the whole authentication process again from the initial login screen.
Depending on the technology with which you're building your application, the only way I can imagine you'd handle logging in to a Facebook account without logging out of an existing one is to set up parallel instances of web browsers, so long as they don't share things like cookies.
I'm playing around with Facebook Connect, trying to use Facebook as the means or authentication on my site. Currently my workflow looks something like this:
Go to URL
Server checks cookies for AccessToken
If AccessToken exists, automatically fill in user's name/profile picture in comment box, and leave AccessToken in hidden input
send page down to client
on submit, verify access token (which was submitted with the rest of the form) is a valid access token for a real person. If so, add comment to Database
refresh page to display new data
if no access token, replace user's name/profile picture with <fb:login-button>, along with the required <script>s.
send page down to client
When user authorizes page/logs into facebook, refresh page
(go back to top, except this time the access token should exist)
So I have a few questions:
Is this secure? I was thinking of ways i would be able to do without the double authentication with Facebook (checking once on page-generation and checking again on comment-submission), and I could not figure any other way short of maintaining my own session-state with each client. Is that worth doing?
Does the access token expire when i log out of Facebook? I'm thinking it should, but it seems I can continue to use the same access token to grab data (i.e. name, url, etc.) after I manually go to Facebook and log myself out. Is it because I'm only asking for public information, and only more intrusive permissions expire on logout?
Given that each person who wants to do something has to provide a unique token from Facebook, this should have the side effect of blocking CSRF, since every action can be traced to a valid Facebook account. Is that right?
Why don't you just use the Facebook Javascript SDK to detect if they're currently logged into Facebook? This will also make the access token available in Javascript so you can make client-side calls to the API.
You can access the same access token server side via the session cookie set by Facebook also.
I can't answer all of your questions but I can tell you that having the access token in a hidden field on your page is risky from a policy perspective, especially if your page can be read by any third-party code such as Google Analytics or AdSense. Facebook will nail you for this as it is leaking user identifying data to third parties. The Facebook userid is in the access token in plain text. Facebook has automated processes that scan for this stuff and will auto-ban your app if it is leaking userids to third parties.
I'm planning out adding Facebook integration to a web app I'm working on. For the most part, it's proceeding smoothly, but I am confused on the proper way to handle the OAuth token.
The sequence of events presented by Facebook here is:
Ask the user to authorize your application, which sends them to a Facebook window.
This will return an Authorization Code generated by Facebook
You then hit https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token with your Authorization Code, which will give you a time-limited OAuth token.
Using the OAuth token, you can make requests to access the user's Facebook profile.
Facebook's documentation has the following to say about token expiration:
In addition to the access token (the access_token parameter), the response contains the number of seconds until the token expires (the expires parameter). Once the token expires, you will need to re-run the steps above to generate a new code and access_token, although if the user has already authorized your app, they will not be prompted to do so again. If your app needs an access token with an infinite expiry time (perhaps to take actions on the user's behalf after they are not using your app), you can request the offline_access permission.
When they say to re-run the steps above, what steps need to be re-run to get a new OAuth token? What data (Facebook UID, Authorization Code, OAuth token) does it make sense to save to my local database?
I would like to be able to have the user continue to interact with my site, and in response to certain user actions, I would like to be able to prompt to user if they want to post something to their Facebook wall.
The access token is time and session based and is unnecessary data to store and have no use after the user have closed the session.
The facebook uid is the only thing you need to identify the user.
Since the Facebook API sometimes is horrible slow you could store the username aswell.
But for identification, all you need is the uid.
The documentation that facebook provides has been updated since you asked this question. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/.