Question

I’m trying to retrieve profile information regarding users who allowed my app to collect data about them (birthday, location etc.). This works fine when, and only when, the user actually visits my app and authenticates with facebook through token exchange.

However, I want to be able to routinely check if the user location hasn’t changed, also if a user adds information about himself on FB, I want to “sync” it with my app, so that the information stays the same.

So I save the users access token, and later on, with a cron job I use the token to get his profile:

$user = mysql_query ... <- get data from mysql

and then:

$user_profile = $facebook->api('/'.$user['uid']);

And it works, of course, but all the data I want from using extended permissions – just doesn’t show up!

Is the the curse of the offline_access disabling? Or do I need to use a different way of obtaining such data. I tried adding ?fields=birthday and etc. on the end of the query, but it still doesn’t work.

Answer 1

Found out how to accomplish this – the access token has to be passed as an additional parameter on the api queries, like such:

$user_profile = $facebook->api('/'.$user['uid'].'', array('access_token' => $session['access_token']));

In case anyone wonders onto this page, here is a way to use saved access tokens, to access full information about the user you want, without having to authenticate:

<?

require "facebook.php";

$facebook = new Facebook(array(
    'appId'  => your_app_id,
    'secret' => your_app_secret
));

// get the saved user details 
$user = mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query('SELECT * FROM `facebook_tokens` WHERE `id` = "1"'));

$session = array(
    'access_token' => $user['access_token'],
    'secret' => $user['secret'],
    'session_key' => $user['session_key'],
    'uid' => $user['uid']
);

$sig = '';
foreach($session as $key => $value) {
    $sig .= implode('=', array($key, $value));
} 
$session['sig'] = md5($sessionStr.'Your App Secret');

$facebook->setSession($session, false);

$user_profile = $facebook->api('/'.$session['uid'], array('access_token' => $session['access_token']));

echo '<pre>';
print_r($user_profile);
echo '</pre>';  

?>