Question

Does anyone have a definitive way to post to a user’s wall, using nothing but the .NET Framework, or Silverlight?

Problems deriving from people’s attempts have been asked here on SO, but I cannot find a full, clear explanation of the Graph API spec and a simple example using WebClient or some similar class from System.Net.

Do I have to send all feed item properties as parameters in the query string? Can I construct a JSON object to represent the feed item and send that (with the access token as the only parameter)?

I expect its no more than a 5 line code snippet, else, point me at the spec in the FB docs.

Thanks for your help,

Luke

Answer 1

This is taken from how we post to a user’s wall. We place the data for the post in the request body (I think we found this to be more reliable than including all the parameters in the query part of the request), it has the same format as a URL encoded query string.

I agree that the documentation is rather poor at explaining how to interact with a lot of resources. Typically I look at the documentation for information on fields and connections, then work with the Graph API Explorer to understand how the request needs to be constructed. Once I’ve got that down it’s pretty easy to implement in C# or whatever. The only SDK I use is Facebook’s Javascript SDK. I’ve found the others (especially 3rd party) are more complicated, buggy, or broken than rolling my own.

private void PostStatus (string accessToken, string userId)
{
    UriBuilder address = new UriBuilder ();
    address.Scheme = "https";
    address.Host = "graph.facebook.com";
    address.Path = userId + "/feed";
    address.Query = "access_token=" + accessToken;

    StringBuilder data = new StringBuilder ();
    data.Append ("caption=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode ("Set by app to describe the app."));
    data.Append ("&link=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode ("http://example.com/some_resource_to_go_to_when_clicked"));
    data.Append ("&description=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode ("Message set by user."));
    data.Append ("&name=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode ("App. name"));
    data.Append ("&picture=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode ("http://example.com/image.jpg"));

    WebClient client = new WebClient ();
    string response = client.UploadString (address.ToString (), data.ToString ());
}