Getting friends picture using facebook-android-SDK

Question

I'm getting friends ids and names using

mAsyncRunner.request("me/friends", new FriendRequestListener());

but I also need the friends profile pictures. I could loop over the friends to get them, but this is many requests.

Is there any way to get friends ids, names AND pictures in one request?

Thanks

Answer 1

Unfortunately not because friends list is a JSON encoded answer and including all pic would be a huge response.
You have to call http://graph.facebook.com/ + userid + /picture?type=large (omit ?type=large if you want small sized version) for every friend.

Answer 2

You wrote:

Is there any way to get friends ids, names AND pictures in one request?

Yes, it's possible, using FQL and the User and Friend FQL tables:

SELECT uid, name, pic, pic_small, pic_big, FROM user WHERE uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me())

In your Android app you can make the FQL query like so:

String query = "SELECT uid, name, pic, pic_small, pic_big FROM user WHERE uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me())";

Bundle params = new Bundle();
params.putString("method", "fql.query");
params.putString("query", query);
mAsyncFacebookRunner.request(null, params, new CustomRequestListener());

where CustomRequestListener() extends RequestListener in the Facebook Android SDK.

This will return:

• id
• user name
• URLs for default, small and big profile images

for the current user's friends.