Category Archives: Facebook Graph API

AngularJS, Facebook Graph API, Javascript

A Facebook Share component for AngularJS

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There are several facebook share components available for AngularJS however I was needing something that could:

  • Show a count of the number of shares
  • Work within the translation infrastructure of my app (ie a custom template)
  • Handle different URL mappings for pages – whilst a typical angular url might be http://app.com/#/path/… facebook can’t scrape this unless you use the #! method or somesuch. Because of this typically on the server we map to different links such as http://app.com/landing/path/…

The below code snippets work together to do all of this in a few lines:

angularApp.directive("ngFbShare", function($http, $rootScope) {
    return {
        restrict: 'A',
        templateUrl: 'views/components/fbshare.html',
        scope: {
            ngFbShare: "@",
        },
        link: function(scope, elem, attrs) {
            var link; // always the latest link relative to the base of the server. Use this for click tracking etc
            var update_share_link = function() {
                link = '/landing/' + scope.ngFbShare;
                scope.share_link = MY_FULL_ADDRESS + link;
            };
            update_share_link();
            scope.$watch('ngFbShare', update_share_link);

            scope.fb_total_count = 0;
            $http.get('http://api.facebook.com/method/links.getStats?format=json&urls=' + scope.share_link)
                .then(function(res) {
                    scope.fb_total_count = res.data[0].total_count;
                });                
        }       
    };      
});             


<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u={{ share_link }}" target="fb_share_window" class="btn btn-primary btn-fb">
    <i class="fa fa-fw fa-facebook"></i> Share
    <span class="count">{{ fb_total_count }}</span>
</a>

Computers, Facebook Graph API, perl

Facebook Graph API Page post changes

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So about a month back it looks like facebook changed their graph API to prevent posting links to pages using the method we had always used which was simply a post to //feed with my access token with message and link parameters. Posting just a message was working fine still but when I tried to add a link in I was just getting access denied.

After spending an hour or two bashing my head against the wall I discovered that you had to first access a list of all your pages with your user access token, then from that you would figure out the page’s special access token, and only then could you post.

So the resulting (somewhat messy) perl code is like:

my $FB_GRAPH_BASE = 'https://graph.facebook.com/v2.2';
my $m = WWW::Mechanize->new;
my $res = $m->get( "$FB_GRAPH_BASE/me/accounts?access_token=$token" );
my $d = decode_json( $res->decoded_content )->{data};
my $page_token = (grep { $_->{id} eq $PAGE_ID } @$d)[0]->{access_token};

$res = $m->post( "$FB_GRAPH_BASE/$PAGE_ID/feed", {
    access_token => $page_token,
    message => $msg,
    link => $url,
});