Spring Social Facebook Reference Manual

The Spring Social Facebook project is an extension to Spring Social that enables integration with Facebook.

With over 700 million users (and growing), Facebook is the largest online social network. While bringing together friends and family, Facebook also offers a rich platform on which to develop applications.

Spring Social Facebook enables integration with Facebook with FacebookConnectionFactory, a connection factory that can be plugged into Spring Social's service provider connection framework, and with an API binding to Facebook's REST API.

The following Maven dependency will add Spring Social Facebook to your project:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-social-facebook</artifactId>
  <version>${org.springframework.social-facebook-version}</version>
</dependency>
		

As an extension to Spring Social, Spring Social Facebook depends on Spring Social. Spring Social's core module will be transitively resolved from the Spring Social Facebook dependency. If you'll be using Spring Social's web module, you'll need to add that dependency yourself:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-social-web</artifactId>
  <version>${org.springframework.social-version}</version>
</dependency>
		

Note that Spring Social Facebook may release on a different schedule than Spring Social. Consequently, Spring Social's version may differ from that of Spring Social Facebook.

Consult Spring Social's reference documentation for more information on Spring Social dependencies.

String accessToken = "f8FX29g..."; // access token received from Facebook after OAuth authorization
Facebook facebook = new FacebookTemplate(accessToken);
	

Facebook facebook = new FacebookTemplate();
	

Connection<Facebook> connection = connectionRepository.findPrimaryConnection(Facebook.class);
Facebook facebook = connection != null ? connection.getApi() : new FacebookTemplate();
	

public interface Facebook extends GraphApi {

    CommentOperations commentOperations();

    EventOperations eventOperations();
	
    FeedOperations feedOperations();

    FriendOperations friendOperations();
	
    GroupOperations groupOperations();

    LikeOperations likeOperations();
	
    MediaOperations mediaOperations();
	
    PlacesOperations placesOperations();
	
    UserOperations userOperations();
	
}
	

You can retrieve a user's Facebook profile data using Facebook' getUserProfile() method:

FacebookProfile profile = facebook.userOperations().getUserProfile();
	

The FacebookProfile object will contain basic profile information about the authenticating user, including their first and last name and their Facebook ID. Depending on what authorization scope has been granted to the application, it may also include additional details about the user such as their email address, birthday, hometown, and religious and political affiliations. For example, getBirthday() will return the current user's birthday if the application has been granted "user_birthday" permission; null otherwise. Consult the JavaDoc for FacebookProfile for details on which permissions are required for each property.

If all you need is the user's Facebook ID, you can call getProfileId() instead:

String profileId = facebook.userOperations().getProfileId();
	

Or if you want the user's Facebook URL, you can call getProfileUrl():

String profileUrl = facebook.userOperations().getProfileUrl();
	

An essential feature of Facebook and other social networks is creating a network of friends or contacts. You can access the user's list of Facebook friends by calling the getFriendIds() method from FriendOperations:

List<String> friendIds = facebook.friendOperations().getFriendIds();
		

This returns a list of Facebook IDs belonging to the current user's list of friends. This is just a list of String IDs, so to retrieve an individual user's profile data, you can turn around and call the getUserProfile(), passing in one of those IDs to retrieve the profile data for an individual user:

FacebookProfile firstFriend = facebook.userOperations().getUserProfile(friendIds.get(0));
		

Or you can get a list of user's friends as FacebookProfiles by calling getFriendProfiles():

List<FacebookProfile> friends = facebook.friendOperations().getFriendProfiles();
		

Facebook also enables users to organize their friends into friend lists. To retrieve a list of the authenticating user's friend lists, call getFriendLists() with no arguments:

List<Reference> friends = facebook.friendOperations().getFriendLists();
		

You can also retrieve a list of friend lists for a specific user by passing the user ID (or an alias) to getFriendLists():

List<Reference> friends = facebook.friendOperations().getFriendLists("habuma");
		

getFriendLists() returns a list of Reference objects that carry the ID and name of each friend list.

To retieve a list of friends who are members of a specific friend list call getFriendListMembers(), passing in the ID of the friend list:

List<Reference> friends = facebook.friendOperations().getFriendListMembers("193839228");
		

FriendOperations also support management of friend lists. For example, the createFriendList() method will create a new friend list for the user:

Reference collegeFriends = facebook.friendOperations().createFriendList("College Buddies");
		

createFriendList() returns a Reference to the newly created friend list.

To add a friend to the friend list, call addToFriendList():

facebook.friendOperations().addToFriendList(collegeFriends.getId(), "527631174");
		

addToFriendList() takes two arguments: The ID of the friend list and the ID (or alias) of a friend to add to the list.

In a similar fashion, you may remove a friend from a list by calling removeFromFriendList():

facebook.friendOperations().removeFromFriendList(collegeFriends.getId(), "527631174");
		

To post a message to the user's Facebook wall, call FeedOperations' updateStatus() method, passing in the message to be posted:

facebook.feedOperations().updateStatus("I'm trying out Spring Social!");
		

If you'd like to attach a link to the status message, you can do so by passing in a FacebookLink object along with the message:

FacebookLink link = new FacebookLink("http://www.springsource.org/spring-social", 
        "Spring Social", 
        "The Spring Social Project", 
        "Spring Social is an extension to Spring to enable applications to connect with service providers.");
facebook.feedOperations().updateStatus("I'm trying out Spring Social!", link);
		

When constructing the FacebookLink object, the first parameter is the link's URL, the second parameter is the name of the link, the third parameter is a caption, and the fourth is a description of the link.

If you want to read posts from a user's feed, FeedOperations has several methods to choose from. The getFeed() method retrieves recent posts to a user's wall. When called with no parameters, it retrieves posts from the authenticating user's wall:

List<Post> feed = facebook.feedOperations().getFeed();
		

Or you can read a specific user's wall by passing their Facebook ID to getFeed():

List<Post> feed = facebook.feedOperations().getFeed("habuma");
		

In any event, the getFeed() method returns a list of Post objects. The Post class has six subtypes to represent different kinds of posts:

The Post's getType() method identifies the type of Post.