Question

I need to get basic user data from Facebook using FB.api('/<some_id>/'). This works well, but is slow, since I need to ask for every id separately and make several calls to facebook. Is there any way to gather all ids and ask for them in single request and get an array?

EDIT

I am not asking for user friends. I am actually trying to gather friends’ friends of a user and that’s something Facebook doesn’t provide, that’s why I am using graph.facebook.com/<id>/ rather than graph.facebook.com/me/friends. I don’t want friends, I’d like to do something like this: graph.facebook.com/<id1>,<id2>,<id3>,../

Answer 1

How about using FQL:

From the Facebook examples:

var friends = FB.Data.query(
     "(select uid2 from friend where uid1 = {0})",
     user_id);

var friendsoffriends = FB.Data.query(
     "select uid2 from friend where uid1 in (select uid2 from {0})",
     friends;

 // Now, register a callback
 FB.Data.waitOn([friends, friendsoffriends], function() {   
   // now display all the results
   FB.Array.forEach(friendsoffriends.value, function(row) {
       console.log(row.uid);
   });
 });

Then edit for whatever collection of ids you wish to use.

The above approach remains valid (as a reasonable generic example) – however, to clarify:

You would previously have used users.getInfo to do what you are asking, as this allows you to pass a list of UIDS. Unfortunately this is being deprecated. However, all this query actually does is wrap an FQL query.

If you then apply the standard FQL ‘in’ syntax you can achieve this:

{
myfriends:'select uid2 from friend where uid1=me()',
friendsoffriends:'select uid2 from friend where uid1 in (select uid2 from #myfriends)'
}

However facebook actively prevents you from doing this with the error:

"error_code": 604,
  "error_msg": "Can't lookup all friends of 123456789. Can only lookup for the logged in user (987654321), or friends of the logged in user with the appropriate permission",

Your other option is to get all of the ids and do an FQL query of the form:

select name from user where uid='123456789' OR uid='987654321' OR uid=...