facebook.S4 (version 1.1.0)

fbOAuth: Create OAuth token to Facebook R session

Description

fbOAuth creates a long-lived OAuth access token that enables R to make authenticated calls to the Facebook API. The token can be saved as a file in disk to be re-used in future sessions. This function relies on the httr package to create the OAuth token, and is a simplified version of one of its examples.

This function will automatically detect the API version for the token you create.

Usage

fbOAuth(app_id, app_secret, permissions = "public_profile,user_friends",
  cache = TRUE)

Arguments

app_id

numeric, App ID of application to be used to create OAUth token. Available at https://developers.facebook.com/apps

app_secret

string, App Secret of application to be used to create OAUth token. Available at https://developers.facebook.com/apps, in Basic Settings panel.

permissions

A character vector with a list of the permissions to grant to the application. After version 2.0 of the Graph API, creating an application with extended permissions requires passing App Review (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/review)

cache

If set to TRUE a file with the authentication details for the current user is saved to disk as .http-oauth, so it won't be asked to authenticate through the browser anymore.

Details

There are two different ways of making authenticated requests. One is to obtain a temporary access token from https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/, which can be used as argument in any of the functions in Rfacebook. An example is shown below.

However, this token has a 2-hour lifetime by default and after it expires, it needs to be renewed. The second alternative is to create an OAuth token. The process to create it is a bit more tedious. It is divided in three steps.

First, go to https://developers.facebook.com/apps, register as a developer and create a new app. You will also need a verified Facebook account. After that, click in "Show" under "App Secret" to find your 'App ID' and 'App Secret'.

Second, run the fbOAuth function with your "App ID" and "App Secret" as arguments.

Third, after pressing Enter, R will try to open a browser window to sign the token. If everything works well, you will get a message that says you can return to R. If not, try again in a few minutes to make sure your application had its settings updated properly.

If you set cache=TRUE, a file .httr-oauth is then saved in your home directory. This file caches the OAuth credentials so you don't need to perform the browser authentication a second time if you don't change the App ID, the App Secret or the permissions you grant.

See Also

facebook.search, FacebookPagesCollection, FacebookPostsCollection

Examples

# NOT RUN {
## See examples for fbOAuth to know how token was created.
 load("fb_oauth")
 
me <- FacebookUsersCollection("me", token=fb_oauth)
as.data.frame(me)

## an example of a request using a temporary access token
	token <- "XXXXXXAAAAAAA1111"
	me <- FacebookUsersCollection("me", token=token)
# }
# NOT RUN {
# }