Question

I’m using the following code to retrieve the user’s friends list and the info for those friends.

$frnd = $facebook ->api('/me/friends?access_token='.$accessToken.'&fields=id,name,about,hometown');
for ($i=0; $i<$nr_friends; $i++)
  {
   $friendinfo = $facebook->api('/'.$frnd["data"][$i]["id"].'?fields=id,name,hometown,location');
   echo $friendinfo['name']." ".$friendinfo['location']['name']." ".$friendinfo['hometown']['name']."</br>";
  }

The problem is, this method takes a lot of time to load the friends info. Is there any way to make this faster?

Answer 1

I think you can condense the querying of friends’ info into one API by passing the IDs as an ids parameter. I haven’t tested this, but try something similar to the following:

// get a list of your your friends' IDs
$friends = $facebook->api('/me/friends?access_token='.$accessToken.'&fields=id');

// condense those IDs into a comma-separated string
$friends_ids = implode(',', $friends);

// now query for friends' name, hometown and location
$friends_info = $facebook->api('/?access_token='.$accessToken.'&fields=id,name,hometown,location&ids='.$friends_ids);

I’m not sure on the exact syntax without testing myself, but you should find more information here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api#reading