Question

I’m working on a project with facebook connect in node.js.
Everything is working great but now I want to get a list of friends from facebook for the connected user, I have the access token from the user
but i don’t know how to start getting the data from facebook

Any help?

Answer 1

Working with facebook API from node.js is very easy, create a module (for example: facebook.js)

facebook.js

var https = require('https');

exports.getFbData = function(accessToken, apiPath, callback) {
    var options = {
        host: 'graph.facebook.com',
        port: 443,
        path: apiPath + '?access_token=' + accessToken, //apiPath example: '/me/friends'
        method: 'GET'
    };

    var buffer = ''; //this buffer will be populated with the chunks of the data received from facebook
    var request = https.get(options, function(result){
        result.setEncoding('utf8');
        result.on('data', function(chunk){
            buffer += chunk;
        });

        result.on('end', function(){
            callback(buffer);
        });
    });

    request.on('error', function(e){
        console.log('error from facebook.getFbData: ' + e.message)
    });

    request.end();
}

Now, in your code import your facebook module (var facebook = require('./facebook.js');) and use it like here:

facebook.getFbData('USER_ACCESS_TOKEN', '/me/friends', function(data){
    console.log(data);
});

The getFbData() is a generic function, you can call it with your api request path (say ‘/me/friends’), pass the access token of the current user and a callback function to be called when the data is ready.