Get apprequests available to user, sent by other users

Question

BUMP: This is not a dead request. I'm still hoping to get a solid answer from someone at Facebook or anyone else. Thanks.

Revised Inquiry: I don't know if I'm not asking the right question, or if I'm asking a valid question that no one can answer.

New Questions:

Can we use FQL or another means to get all of the requests seen at reqs.php? I'm essentially looking for something like this:

SELECT request_id, app_id FROM apprequest WHERE recipient_uid = me()

Notifications return that data but app requests are often batched into a single record with a link identifying some but not all requests. I want individual records for all app requests currently open. The data to do this must be available, as this is the data used to build notifications! It just seems that this is not being made available to us. :(

Thanks!

Original Inquiry Follows:

I have an app that aggregates various sources of Facebook information for a user. One of the sets of data I'm working on is the collection of apprequests which have been sent to this user by friends. For example, I open GreatApp and click to send a request to you. You may or may not use GreatApp but let's assume you haven't blocked requests from it. You now open my AggregatorApp that shows my request to you, and the included link back to GreatApp. The data you see is the same as at reqs.php but formatted differently, with much more data, and of course simply much better. ;)

I thought that is what we got in apprequests. From this question I'm understanding that apprequests is a collection of requests sent out by the current application.

When using path/me/apprequests, we don't need to specify an app ID. But I believe here we do need to provide an app token rather than a user token. Is that correct? If that's correct then this confirms that the requests are those that this app sent out, not requests generated by other apps.

When using FQL, we need to identify the uid of the app as well as the id of the request in order to query the apprequests table. I get that, but even with a valid request id and app id (and valid permissions) FQL doesn't return request data. (I haven't checked with an app id, maybe that's the key.)

I am hoping people will provide some concrete examples for any of the above, specifically getting inbound requests from other apps, and confirmation about what token or other detail is expected for /apprequests and the apprequests table to return data.

Thanks!

Other threads asking the same question without a good (or any) response: thread1 thread2

Answer 1

You need to make a graph api request to get the apprequests connection for a user. See the current documentation here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/.

In the Connections table, the documentation correctly notes that you need an application access token to retrive the requests to that user. There's a bug in the documentation under (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/#apprequests) that claims you need a user access token. This is incorrect, and (as you've seen) will return an empty list of requests.

Requests sent by an application are only visible to the application. The user can't see or delete these requests (though they are able to hide the request). The reason for this is that the applications can put data into the requests (255 characters) that's never exposed to the user or other applications.

I don't think there's a way you'll be able to aggregate a user's requests from apps that you don't have an access token for.

Answer 2

What I have found out (before my question was deleted) was that you can't access requests with a user token, and app tokens can only access requests that app has sent (and I found that out myself in the documentation and playing with the graph explorer). Since I know there are iPhone apps and browser plugins for processing requests, I assume they are accessing the page itself and parsing the data (like scraping a site). The downfall to that approach is that on the request page only around 100 requests from each app are shown at one time.

(Unless some people have found a way that they aren't sharing...)

Answer 3

You are right, you need the app_access_token and not the user_access_token.

I think the FB documentation has an error.

Answer 4

The definitive answer was provided by a Facebook developer here in response to my bug report. The resolution is that this is By Design. This relates to the note by @noah-callaway that there's probably some app-specific data in requests that should not be available to other apps.

This is a shame, in my opinion, because as Facebook is all about sharing data among friends, I think it adds a dimension to the ecosystem when apps can share (limited and reasonable) information among one another.

Thanks for the responses!