Question

I have no idea how to start to retrieve my Facebook friends using the Facebook API. I have read the Graph API docs.

Secondly, I’m doing TDD so I want to start with my test cases.

At first, these will be integration tests because I have to integrate the real life Facebook api. After that works, I’ll mock out these tests to make them unit tests.

So this is why I’m stuck. Please assume that I have a Facebook account (eg. email + password) so I can authenticate and then use the access token to get my friends.

UPDATE:

I also do have an FB App already setup (eg. app id / app secret).

Answer 1

The first thing that you need to do to get the list of friends, or any other api request on the behalf of the user, is to authenticate the user and get a user access token.
There are two authentication flows:

• Client-Side: will result with a short lived access token (expires within a few hours) which you can then extend (on the server side) for a long lived using the new endpoint.
• Server-Side: results with a long lived access token for about 60 days.

It will probably be hard to do that with TDD (at least at first), and so you might want to use one of the following facebook tools which will generate the access token for you:

• Access Token Tool: gives you a list of `access tokens for all your apps bound to your own user’. Per application you get both a user token and an app token.
• Graph API Explorer: Select your application at the top right corner and then click the “Get Access Token” button, then select the permissions you need and approve it, when the dialog closes you’ll see the access token in the field.

With the access token that you get you can start querying the api.
To get the list of friends simply issue a request to me/fiends as explained in the Friends connection of the User object documentation.

I’m not a C# developer, but I’m aware of this C# SDK for Facebook, it should (like all other facebook SDKs) have implemented most of the work for you for sending the api requests and parsing the returned data.
From a quick look at their getting started documentation it should look something like:

var accessToken = "THE ACCESS TOKEN YOU HAVE";
var client = new FacebookClient(accessToken);
dynamic me = client.Get("me/friends");
...