Using the Facebook Graph API to get a list of a user's friends

Question

I need to get a hold of a user of my app's list of friends to filter the users that show up in a friend picker. I know I can call the following and get the list:

https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=<access_token>

I tried it out in the address bar with my own account and it seems to work exactly as I need it to. Problem is, I don't know how to make use of it in a js file itself. I tried calling it and getting the data out with a jquery call but it doesn't seem to return anything helpful.

$.get("https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends",
    {access_token: <access_token>},
    function(data){ document.write("Data Loaded: " + data);});

How should I be calling this in my js files and then actually make use of the information? Thanks.

Answer 1

UPDATE: As per the changes introduced in V2.0, /me/friends will return app friends only.

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The right way to do that is by using the Facebook Javascript-SDK, something like this:

function getFriends() {
    FB.api('/me/friends', function(response) {
        if(response.data) {
            $.each(response.data,function(index,friend) {
                alert(friend.name + ' has id:' + friend.id);
            });
        } else {
            alert("Error!");
        }
    });
}

Please note that:

1. I'm using jQuery here too
2. You may need to check if the user is connected before calling this function.

Answer 2

If you want to extract information from the Graph with JavaScript, you will have to use the JS SDK and FB.api method to make the calls.