Question

I am creating an android app for my facebook page. The app is supposed to display random statuses(not just the recent ones) from the facebook page. Is there anyway I could do this?

Answer 1

I haven’t done anything of that kind ever, but I think you can gran some logic from this and get it to work.

Step 1:

Make a call to the Facebook API, get all Status Updates and in a for loop, add them to an ArrayList<String>. For example, Facebook returns its data in JSON format. I am assuming, you already know how to fetch data. You need to parse the “message” tag from the JSON data returned by your Facebook API call.

For example:

ArrayList<String> arrStatusMessage;


for (int i = 0; i < JAFeeds.length(); i++)  {
    JSONObject JOFeeds = JAFeeds.getJSONObject(i);

    if (JOFeeds.has("message")) {
        String strStatusMessage = JOFeeds.getString("message");
        arrStatusMessage.add(strStatusMessage );
    }
}

Step 2:

Once you have your entire set of Facebook Status Messages, you will now need to use a java.util.Random instance.

For example: (Please note: I have not tested this code and it might result in errors. You may have to play around with it a bit to get it to work. 🙁 )

private static final Random randomGenerator = new Random();


int intRandom = randomGenerator.nextInt(arrStatusMessage.size());
String strRandomStatus = arrStatusMessage.get(intRandom);

Step 3:

Use the strRandomStatus to set it on a TextView.

For example:

TextView txtRanStatus = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.txtRanStatus);
txtRanStatus.setText(strRandomStatus);

You haven’t posted any code, so it is difficult to provide something that fits in your scheme of things. But I think this should get you started. You will, possibly, need to adapt a few things and fit them in your own code.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: As per a comment by th OP, adding some bits of code to fetch Facebook Status Messages:

in your onCreate() method:

Start a new AsyncTask:

new getFacebookFeeds().execute();

I use this method in my app to make the Facebook Call to get all feeds from the Graph API.

private class getFacebookFeeds extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, Void>  {
    @Override
    protected Void doInBackground(Void... params) {
        String URL = "https://graph.facebook.com/me/home&access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN?limit=10";
        try {
            HttpClient hc = new DefaultHttpClient();
            HttpGet get = new HttpGet(URL);
            HttpResponse rp = hc.execute(get);

            if (rp.getStatusLine().getStatusCode() == HttpStatus.SC_OK) {
                String result = EntityUtils.toString(rp.getEntity());

                // GET THE INTIAL RESULTS JSON ROOT
                JSONObject JORoot = new JSONObject(result);

                // GET THE "DATA" TAG FOR FEEDS ROOT
                JSONArray JAFeeds = JORoot.getJSONArray("data");

                for (int i = 0; i < JAFeeds.length(); i++) {
                    JSONObject JOFeeds = JAFeeds.getJSONObject(i);

                    if (JOFeeds.has("message")) {
                        String strStatusMessage = JOFeeds.getString("message");
                        arrStatusMessage.add(strStatusMessage );
                    }
                }
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            // TODO: handle exception
        }
    }

}

You can do the remaining code, where you select a random Status Update, in the onPostExecute() of the AsyncTask shown above:

@Override
protected void onPostExecute(Void result) {
    int intRandom = randomGenerator.nextInt(arrStatusMessage.size());
    String strRandomStatus = arrStatusMessage.get(intRandom);

    txtRanStatus.setText(strRandomStatus);

}

Declare the TextView as a Global Variable and cast it on your onCreate() before calling the AsyncTask. I think this should work just fine. Let me know how it goes. 🙂