使用javascript SDK和应用访问令牌获取Facebook用户名

Question

I've coded some php which retrieves facebook user ids, stored in my database, and then goes on to request their user names. It all works fine, however this process adds an additonal 1.8 seconds to my pageload, which I would like to avoid if possible.

So I rebuilt the code, and added some javascript which looks for the user ids and then requests the user names. This method runs a lot faster and my page load is 1.8 sec shorter. However in order to make it work I'm adding my app access token to the javascript, which ofcourse is a security black hole

The javascript fb.api call looks like that at the moment

        FB.api('/'+userid, {access_token : 'appAccessToken'}, function(response) {
            userNameSpan.text(response.name);
        });

Is there any other way I can make this work, without falling back to the pure server-side solution which is awfully slow?

Answer 1

I'm getting no answers at all to my questions lately. Anyway, the only other solutions I can think of are ajax calling the php file, which will be requesting the user names itself, or storing the user names in the database along with the user ids.

The ajax solution is problematic for a lot of reasons, mainly because the platform is joomla and the php is a custom module, which means that I will have to either call the file outside of the joomla framework (security issues arise) or build my own helper file for the custom module in order for it to work with the com_ajax component of joomla, which ofcourse is a timesink.

The database solution has the downside that the usernames will not be dynamic, meaning that if a user chnages his/her user name after he/she has been added in the database, the change will not be available to me. I guess I could also store the time the user was inserted in the database and check how much time has passed, and perform a facebook request for his/her username only after a predefined time has passed, and then updating the database if the username has changed. Not quite dynamic, but close enough

If any1 has any other ideas, please don't be shy

Answer 2

Although I'm gonna go for the database solution, I found another solution that can decrease the pageload significantly.

Instead of making an api call for each user, you can do a batch call, requesting info about many users in one call. It is explained here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/making-multiple-requests

That would cut down my calls from 6 to 1. However since reading up a bit about facebook names, I realized they do not change that often any more, so the database solution is better for my case