Question

Has anyone been able to figure out how to authenticate an external web site to post to a facebook app’s page (wall)?

We have an external rails site, and all I’m looking to do is post to our facebook app’s page whenever a new resource is created. I’m so confused right now with all these tokens and expirations!!!

Ex. I can manually visit:
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=(our client id)&redirect_uri=(our redirect uri)&scope=manges_pages,publish_stream&response_type=token

(no parenthesis)

to get the account access token, but this approach is manual and it it works only if I go through my browser and I’m signed into FB (so it’s using cookies). How can I automate the authenthientication process for my external web app?

Answer 1

I would try to use a Cross-Domain AJAX GET request to the URL (with parameters). This will allow the request to utilize the current user’s cookies. jQuery is fairly reasonable for this type of situation. $.ajax(); using JSONP should do it.

Something like this:

$.ajax({
    type: 'GET',
    url: 'https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth',
    data: {
        client_id: '(our client id)',
        redirect_uri: '(our redirect uri)',
        scope: 'manges_pages',
        publish_stream: '',
        response_type: 'token',
        format: 'jsonp'
    },
    dataType: 'jsonp',
    success: function(data)
    {
        // Do stuff.
    }
});

EDIT:
Should be noted that I haven’t ever done this with Facebook’s API specifically. In doing a little digging, I don’t know if this is possible to do with just a GET request:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/

Seems you need some kind of authentication to happen on the server-side before you can publish to their API.