Juan, thanks for the thorough response, and I fully agree that they seem to
have changed things a lot and this has really annoyed developers. I'm pretty
fed up already after 1 day of going in circles. I looked through bug 146 before
but i am going back over it again. It seems I need to extend my permissions and
add < user_photos > but after reading through 6 pages of docs on this I'm still
pretty confused! Even in the docs they are mentioning the "migrations" tab and
enabling "New Data Permissions" but this option does not exist! I'll re-post if
I get anywhere or run into new difficulties, or just give up! Thanks
> Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 23:05:25 -0300
> Subject: Re: [Flashcoders] Facebook API GetPhotos not working
> From: califa010.flashcod...@gmail.com
> To: flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com
>
> It's most likely a permissions problem. Even if your pics are public, you
> (as a user) have to grant the app access to your data (except for the most
> basic stuff such as name, etc). This wasn't necessary before, if I recall
> correctly, but alas, FB API is rather unstable. They seem to change their
> minds about how things work all the time (and are not afraid of breaking the
> code of the suckers that use their services; you can get away with it if
> you're facebook, I guess).
>
> Check this out:
>
> http://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/issues/detail?id=146
>
> How do you ask the user for permssions? This doesn't have an easy answer,
> I'm afraid. It depends on how your app connects to FB. I've used the
> "official" AS library above in one project and I know it's actually a
> wrapper around a JS library. Don't remember the specifics, but I do remember
> that in all of the client libraries I used (the old JS client, the new JS
> client that uses the new Graph API and the PHP client), you can request a
> check for permissions when you call the login function; and if said
> permissions were not granted, the user will be presented a popup to accept
> or deny your app these permissions.
>
> So you have to look up what's the name of the permission (whatever they
> decided it to call it this week) and how you can pass that to the JS code
> that actually connects to FB (I think there was something for that already
> in the AS library, but I'm not positive).
>
> This should solve the problem in most scenarios, I think there are some
> cases not covered here, such as if the user is already logged in when they
> get to your app; the login method won't be called, so the user won't be
> asker for the necessary extended permissions; if they already grant your app
> these, no problem; if they don't or they revoked them, you'll have to work
> around this somehow. I remember I had to do this a while time ago (using the
> new JS client for the Graph API), but it was a mess, and involved using FQL
> from JS and whatnot... (all this because there's a very useful method in the
> FB API that returns the user status, but they forgot to include the current
> permissions granted by the user in the response; so you have to find other
> way to get that data, which in my case was using an ad hoc SQLish language
> called FQL. -- Sorry, this last paragraph was mostly a rant; developing
> against the FB API is a bit frustrating at times...)
>
> An alternative approach I used (but only because I had to use the new Graph
> API) was doing something similar to what this guy did:
>
> http://wellconsidered.posterous.com/fbflashbridge-v01
>
> It's not as nice as the "official" library. It's kind of bare bones: some JS
> glue code around FB's JS client and a bit of Actionscript to communicates
> with it. You don't have all the typed objects and stuff. I must say,
> compared to adobe's lib, it was way easier to debug / troubleshoot, though
> (since there's way less code and it's kind of easy to follow it; anyway, I
> used this approach because I had to use the graph API, but if I had to do
> any other FB app, I think I'd go this way, but that's just me, I guess).
>
> Hope this helps somehow or at least gives you some pointers.
>
> Cheers
> Juan Pablo Califano
>
>
>
> 2010/8/10 David Hunter
>
> >
> > Hi List, . Anyone have any experience with the Facebook API? I have been on
> > it all day and got a simple application (based on the tutorial on adobe's
> > site) to work which fetches the users information such as name and
> > mini-photo, and other calls like listing their friends. But when it comes to
> > getting their photos, GetPhotos() it always returns an array of zero length.
> > Does anyone have any knowledge on this? . I have seen lots of complaints
> > about this issue on the forums, but much of the advice suggests changing
> > parameters that don't exist in the application settings anymore. I'm not
> > sure if the problem is a permissions thing set in the app, a permissions
> > thing set by the user (i have made my photos completely public and still no
> > change), if i am lacking a session key, or som
