Question

Looking over the spring social facebook api, EventOperations offers

    createEvent(java.lang.String name, java.lang.String startTime, 
                                                      java.lang.String endTime)

to post Events to facebook.

Is there a way to post more information for the event, like event image and event description?

Answer 1

Looking at createEvent method, it does not currently support the attachment (event image). It does however call into GraphApi publish to actually publish the event:

public String createEvent(String name, String startTime, String endTime) {
    requireAuthorization();
    MultiValueMap<String, Object> data = new LinkedMultiValueMap<String, Object>();
    data.set("name", name);
    data.set("start_time", startTime);
    data.set("end_time", endTime);
    return graphApi.publish("me", "events", data);
}

graphApi.publish(…) itself ( which is implemented in FacebookTemplate ) would support anything as a {key,value} pair that Facebook is ready to accept, as it just delegates to the RestTemplate, and feeds all the {key,value} pairs to Facebook through a regular HTTP POST:

public String publish(String objectId, String connectionType, MultiValueMap<String, Object> data) {
    MultiValueMap<String, Object> requestData = new LinkedMultiValueMap<String, Object>(data);
    URI uri = URIBuilder.fromUri(GRAPH_API_URL + objectId + "/" + connectionType).build();
    Map<String, Object> response = getRestTemplate().postForObject(uri, requestData, Map.class);
    return (String) response.get("id");
}

Hence you can extend the EventTemplate and add another createEvent method, that would take an image name and an image file path, and would added it as an additional {key,value} to a data MultiMap:

data.set( "@" + imageName, "@" + imagePath )

Hence the method would look close to:

public String createEvent( String name, 
                           String startTime, 
                           String endTime,
                           String imageName,
                           String imagePath ) {   // or maybe even "File image", where you would derive the path
    requireAuthorization();
    MultiValueMap<String, Object> data = new LinkedMultiValueMap<String, Object>();
    data.set("name", name);
    data.set("start_time", startTime);
    data.set("end_time", endTime);

    data.set( "@" + imageName, "@" + imagePath );  // <<< adding this line

    return graphApi.publish("me", "events", data);
}

This of course does not include any possible validation that you might want to do, etc..
Once you have this working, which seems to be pretty straightforward, you can donate / contribute it back to Spring Social => they’d be very pleased 🙂