Facebook Cookbook

how to send notifications and emails

sending notifications and emails are very important features of a facebook app. now i’m going to show how you will send notifications and emails to users.

there are two types of notifications: user-to-user and application-to-user

• a user-to-user notification is sent on behalf of one user to one or more other users
• application-to-user notifications are sent on an application’s behalf and do not require an active session.

case 1: suppose you have an application question/answer type. let user  ‘x’ sent a question to user ‘y’. so how will you notify user ‘y’ that he received a question. you can send a notification to user ‘y’ from user ‘x’ and also you could send an email to user ‘y’ from user ‘x’.

solution: for sending notification you could write this code

/*------- sends a notification or request to a set of users. notifications are items sent by an application to a user's notifications page in response to some sort of user activity within an application ----------*/
// $facebook->api_client->notifications_send(ids, notificationmessage, notificationtype);

$facebook->api_client->notifications_send('654321890', "you've received a msg from <fb:name uid='7464635353' />", 'user_to_user');

this notification is sent from user to user, that’s why you’ve to mention notification type as ‘user_to_user’

another imortant thing is that, you could send same notifications to more than one users as a single api call. just specify the ids as a comman separated list like

$facebook->api_client->notifications_send('654321890,656565654, 49393939', "msg", 'user_to_user');

case 2: let you also want to send an email to user ‘y’ from user ‘x’ in the situation of case 1.

solution: you could only send emails to the users, who have both authorized your application and granted it the email extended permission. so how will you ask the user for accepting extended permission for email. here is the way. write the below code in your view page or layout:

<fb:prompt-permission perms="email">Would you like to receive email from our application?</fb:prompt-permission>

this will render this link in your view page:

when user will click this link, a dialog box will open and show user a message  to accept receive emails permission. if user accept this permission, then this link will not shown to that user in future.

here is the api call that you have to use to send email:

//$facebook->api_client->notifications_sendEmail('recipients', 'mail_subject', "tex", 'fbml');
$facebook->api_client->notifications_sendEmail('73737373', 'you received a question', "", "hi user <fb:name uid='47363633' /> has sent you a message");

remember the parameters:

• recipients: a comma-separated list of recipient IDs. you can email up to 100 people at a time.
• subject: the subject of the email message. as of 10/28/2008, the subject will accept a limited set of fbml tags, including names, and tags related to internationalization.
• text: the plain text version of the email content. you must include a non-empty value for at least one of either the fbml or text parameters. the fbml input takes precedence, but if the given fbml value is invalid or cannot be rendered, then the text will be used instead. there is currently no character limit on the length of either the text or fbml body.
• fbml: the fbml version of the email. you must include a non-empty value for at least one of either the fbml or text parameters. the fbml parameter is a stripped-down set of fbml  that allows only html/fbml tags that result in text, links, linebreaks, as well as tags related to internationalization.

references:

• http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Notifications.sendEmail
• http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Notifications.send
• http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:prompt-permission

how to show facebook friends status

facebook status api is still in beta, in one of previous posts hasin showed how to set status of users with their permission. now, let’s see how we can get our facebook friend’s status, in next step i will show a tricky way to get a random person’s status who is not your facebook friend.

first let’s see how we can show our friends status. these following lines of code will return us an array

include_once("config.php");
//i'm using my own id
$user_status= $facebook->api_client->fql_query("SELECT status FROM user WHERE uid =579152077");
echo "<pre>";
print_r($user_status);
echo "</pre>";
//this will return an array like following
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [status] => Array
                (
                    [message] => is testing facebook status api.
                    [time] => 1234464510
                    [status_id] => 53699066735
                )

        )

)

so we can get any of our facebook friends’ status like this. If no status messages are found, the method returns an empty status_get_response element. now, the thing is, we can check our friends status from “live feed” tab on our home page right? so this status api could be interesting if we can show random friend’s status eh? unfortunately, this current beta API doesn’t support to get any random friends status but for the time being there is a possible way to get status of a person who is not our facebook friends BUT if he/she has at least 1 mutual friend. so let’s find a least possible way to get a random friend’s status who is NOT our friend on facebook but has a mutual friend. don’t worry, you don’t have to know his or her id let’s have a look at following code.

include_once("config.php");
//get id by the random person's full name
$user_details = $facebook->api_client->fql_query("SELECT uid FROM user WHERE name = 'your_random_friend_full_name'");
//if this full name is unique and has a mutual friend with you, you can get his/her id like this...
$user_details[0]['uid'];
//now let's find out the status of that person
$status_array= $facebook->api_client->fql_query("SELECT status FROM user WHERE uid = {$user_details[0]['uid']}");
//now, simply it will return an array with status message like before.

I know this is not the right way to get status. i strongly believe facebook should open this status access to random friends with email id or full name – only then we can expect lot’s of cool application on facebook based on this status api.

how to successfully keep record of which friend is accepting your invitation

to keep record lets create a table named users .

CREATE TABLE `friends` (
`uid` INT NOT NULL ,
`rid` INT NOT NULL ,
) ;

then you have to add a small code snippet in the invitation code.we just need to add &next=’.urlencode(’?rid=’.$user).

have a look in side the content there is a php line which will show the choose with a url .
just after adding the new code the url will look like

echo htmlentities('<fb:req-choice url="http://www.facebook.com/add.php?api_key='.$appapikey.'next='.urlencode('?rid='.$user).'" label="app name" />');

now we have to change the setting of the application .and change the Post-Add Redirect URL like this

this is the install.php

include ‘config.php’;

//$url is ur desired location where u want to user to be redirected after installation (ie : invite page) ;
$url = "http://apps.facebook.com/appname/invite.php";

mysql_query(“insert into users value (‘$user’,$_GET[‘rid’]);”);

$facebook->redirect($url);
?>

how dose it works ? first we are sending the current user id in invitation page. and as we set the Post-Add Redirect URL to a page when any user install the application from the invitation he/she will be redirect to the install.php page and the first user who invited him/her will be passed to install.php page using HTTP GET method .they store those 2 user id as u want .