Question

I’m currently working on an alternative way to view the threads and messages. But I have problems figuring out how to display the images attached to a message.

I have a GET request to this url: https://graph.facebook.com/t_id.T_ID/messages?access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN. And the response includes

"attachments": {
   "data": [
      {
         "id": "df732cf372bf07f29030b5d44313038c",
         "mime_type": "image/jpeg",
         "name": "image.jpg",
         "size": 76321
      }
   ]
}

but I can’t find any way to access the image.

Thanks

Answer 1

Support for this hasn’t yet been added to the Graph API and as with many of the other messaging APIs, it’s currently only avaialable for testing (i.e you must be a developer of the app to use it presently)

There’s an undocumented REST API endpoint for this, which should work for any app (that you’re the developer of, as above).

To use the REST method to get the attachment data, it’s

https://api.facebook.com/method/messaging.getattachment

With parameters:

access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN
mid=MESSAGE_ID
aid=ATTACHMENT_ID
format=json     //(it defaults to XML otherwise)

The response is like this:

{"content_type":"image\/png","filename":"Screen Shot 2012-02-08 at 11.35.35.png","file_size":42257,"data":<FILE CONTENTS>}

I’ve just tested this and it worked OK for me, taking the <FILE CONTENTS> and base64 decoding them gave me back the original image correctly