Question

I want to create a flash Facebook application in which, after pressing a button, the user will be able to browse his/her photo albums and choose a photo. How should i do that? What will be the code under the button to gain authentication from any user using this application?
Thanks.

Answer 1

I am currently writing a facebook application for a university assignment that will allow the user to do everything you can do in facebook, but via the flash player window. You will need a few basic things happening in order to do it.

1. User log in and authentication – this must be done via Facebook – using OAuth authentication, and meeting all of facebook’s security policies
2. register the application with facebook
3. Use the Graph API (facebook’s developer’s toolkit) to get the necessary functions that will communicate with facebook via flash.

In Flash itself you will use a bunch of URLRequest functions to send out to FB for information, then you will need to retrieve that data responses and store them to variables (extracting data with a few lines of code is easy, something like this;

//initialise variables

public var photoURL:String;

var Request:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://www.whatever the url  for the graph api service you are using which is founf from FB");

//that ^^ will send off a request for the url, you then want to use the returned data by registering an event handler like this below

functionName.addEventListener(onComplete, completeHandler);

functionName(event, EVENT)
{
   var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(Request);
   var data:XML = new XMLData(load.loader); //i think this is right but not 100% sure, fiddle with it
   //then you want to extract the data that is returned, for example, extracting xml data from a rest request works by hitting data from the xml by specifying a path to the object you want. an example of xml is this <rsp stat="ok"><photos ......more code="morecode"><photo url="url of photo"></photo</photos> so you can hit the url in that example like this;

   photoURL = data.photos.photo.@url; //this line will grab the photo url for you, allowing you to dynamically create an array and assign photos to the flash stage according to the url you get
}

this is fairly advanced stuff and I am assuming that you have some decent knowledge on AS3, XML, and the FB API, if you need more help just reply