Question

I implemented the Add Friend dialog on iPhone using the post on stackoverflow:
Facebook friends dialog returns "Unknown method" error, it’s implemented for Android but easy to convert to iPhone.

It worked fine until a few days ago when it stopped working and now it’s throwing me an error:

An error occurred with HitMe. Please try again later.
API Error Code: 3
API Error Description: Unknown method
Error Message: This method isn’t supported for this display type

I tried to search in facebook roadmap: https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/ but couldn’t find any mentioning of the change, did anyone experience this issue or know another way to implement the “Friend Request” dialog on iPhone?

This is the changes I made to the Facebook 2.0 sdk to implement the “Friend Request” dialog:

in dialog:andParams:andDelegate: method in Facebook.m I replaced the original code by the following code:

-(void)dialog:(NSString *)action
 andParams:(NSMutableDictionary *)params
 andDelegate:(id <FBDialogDelegate>)delegate {

[_fbDialog release];

NSString *dialogURL;

if ([action isEqualToString:kFriends]) 
{
    dialogURL = [kDialogBaseURLForFriends stringByAppendingString:action];
}
else 
{
    dialogURL = [kDialogBaseURL stringByAppendingString:action];
}

if ([action isEqualToString:kFriends])
{
    [params setObject:@"popup" forKey:@"display"];
}
else 
{
    [params setObject:@"touch" forKey:@"display"];
}

[params setObject:kSDKVersion forKey:@"sdk"];
[params setObject:kRedirectURL forKey:@"redirect_uri"];

if ([action isEqualToString:kLogin]) {
    [params setObject:@"user_agent" forKey:@"type"];
    _fbDialog = [[FBLoginDialog alloc] initWithURL:dialogURL loginParams:params delegate:self];
} else {
    [params setObject:_appId forKey:@"app_id"];
    if ([self isSessionValid]) {
        [params setValue:[self.accessToken stringByReplacingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]
                  forKey:@"access_token"];
        [self extendAccessTokenIfNeeded];
    }

    // by default we show dialogs, frictionless cases may have a hidden view
    BOOL invisible = NO;

    // frictionless handling for application requests
    if ([action isEqualToString:kApprequests]) {        
        // if frictionless requests are enabled
        if (self.isFrictionlessRequestsEnabled) {
            //  1. show the "Don't show this again for these friends" checkbox
            //  2. if the developer is sending a targeted request, then skip the loading screen
            [params setValue:@"1" forKey:@"frictionless"];  
            //  3. request the frictionless recipient list encoded in the success url
            [params setValue:@"1" forKey:@"get_frictionless_recipients"];
        }

        // set invisible if all recipients are enabled for frictionless requests
        id fbid = [params objectForKey:@"to"];
        if (fbid != nil) {
            // if value parses as a json array expression get the list that way
            SBJsonParser *parser = [[[SBJsonParser alloc] init] autorelease];
            id fbids = [parser objectWithString:fbid];
            if (![fbids isKindOfClass:[NSArray class]]) {
                // otherwise seperate by commas (handles the singleton case too)
                fbids = [fbid componentsSeparatedByString:@","];
            }                
            invisible = [self isFrictionlessEnabledForRecipients:fbids];             
        }
    }

    _fbDialog = [[FBDialog alloc] initWithURL:dialogURL
                                       params:params
                              isViewInvisible:invisible
                         frictionlessSettings:_frictionlessRequestSettings 
                                     delegate:delegate];
}

[_fbDialog show];

}

where kFriends is @”friends” and kDialogBaseURLForFriends is @”https://facebook.com/dialog/“

Answer 1

I’m seeing the same problem here when using the Facebook Send Dialog (https://www.facebook.com/dialog/send?….) API calls.

Calls that have been running fine for months in iOS and Android apps now fail with API Error Code: 3 like mentioned above.

I’ve tried leaving out display=iframe altogether, or changing to other display types like popup etc. It still doesn’t work. The docs at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/ still mentions iOS and Android as valid use cases for these type of dialogs. Trying out the same URLs in a desktop browser works fine.

Update: Found a workaround that works for Android at least. Simply change the useragent of the webview container:

webView.getSettings().setUserAgentString("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1207.1 Safari/537.1");

This gets the Send Dialog working for me on Android again at least. It’s ugly but it works (for now).