Facebook Cookbook

friends selection custom component

for 1 of my facebook application, i was  needed a custom friends selector. the purpose was, i’ve a page from where i’ve to select multiple friends and then i’ll submit those selected friend ids using ajax call without refreshing the page.

then i searched the documentation of fbml. in facebook component, there are 2 types of friends selector

1. http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:multi-friend-selector
2. http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:multi-friend-selector_(condensed)

but both of these are totally controlled by facebook and these components are used to send invitation or request to friends. i need a component like figure 2. the fbml code for the second component is below:

<fb :request-form method=”post” action=”http://yourdomain.com/submit.php” content=”Select Friends” type=”gifts” invite=”true”>
<div class=”clearfix” style=”padding-bottom: 10px;”>
<fb :multi-friend-selector condensed=”true” selected_rows=”0? style=”width: 220px;” />
</div>
<fb :request-form-submit />
</fb>

but I was needed a component that would be fully controlled by me. so,  I developed a friends selection component and I’m sharing it.

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how to resize facebook popup dialog box

while developing facebook applications, sometimes we don’t like to use the default facebook popup dialog box, we want to resize/modify to show it on our own way. but how can we do it? we don’t have the css class on our hand right. but don’t worry, we have this simple trick to make it on our own way.

let’s see how we can do it….

first let’s see how a default popup box looks like. let’s print something pretty simple and set a button that will call the javascript function which will create the default popup dialog box. following code will do it for us..

<?php
include_once("config.php");
?>
<input type="button" value="click me" onclick=" return showMe()">
<script language="javascript">
function showMe()
{
   new Dialog().showMessage('Hi There', ' Hi, i\'m a default pop-up, but shh you can play with me!' );
}
</script>

and this will generate a popup like the following screen shot.

Default Dialog Box

now, we want to change this default dialog box right. ok, this default dialog box uses some css classes which can be found using firefox add on firebug. one of them is called “dialog_body” which contains the body of the dialog box. Idea is to overwrite the css class to make it our own let’s change the “dialog_body” class in the following way…

<style>
.dialog_body{
   background-color:#CCCCCC !important;
   font-weight:bold !important;
   font-size:16px;
   text-align:center !important;
   padding-left:0px !important;
   padding-top:10px!important;
   padding-bottom:10px!important;
}
</style>

just set the “!important” to get the priority over the existing properties. now let’s see how out new dialog box looks like ..

Changed Dialog Box

cool eh?
now, how about make this popup dialog box wider than the default size? well, we have that trick too!
this css class called “pop_dialog_table“, which holds the whole dialog box’s div. so increasing it’s width will also increase the size of the dialog box. so let’s do it!

<style>
.pop_dialog_table {
   width: 650px !important;
}
</style>

how this will look like then? have a look at the following screen shot

Wider Dialog Box

simple eh? hope it helps to play with this popup dialog box on your own way!