Facebook Cookbook

Invitations and Requests

Problem

I want to give my users the ability to invite their friends to install my app.

Solution

There are a bunch of different ways to handle the actual invitation controls, but they all stem from the use of the fb:request-form tag. The general principle is that you start with an fb:request-form tag and include parameters that define what you want to do, and then you include some combination of fb:multi-friend-selector, fb:multi-friend-input, fb:friend-selector, and fb:request-form-submit. Let’s start with a look at the following example:

<?php
$inviteContent = htmlentities('<fb:name uid="' . $user . '" firstnameonly="true"
 shownetwork="false"/> says this is the most awesomest Super Disco Napping
 application ever made. Come take naps with <fb:pronoun objective="true"
 uid=" ' . $user . '"/>!');
$inviteContent .= htmlentities('<fb:req-choice url="new_napper.php"
 label="Take Naps with Me!" />');
?>

<fb:request-form
    action="index.php"
    method="post"
    invite="true"
    type="Disco Nap"
    content="<?php echo $inviteContent?>">
    <fb:multi-friend-selector actiontext="Tell all your friends! Tell the
 whole bunch!" />
</fb:request-form>

It’s a good idea to put the name of the user sending the invites or requests right into the content so that it has some context for the recipient. The fb:req-choice tag creates a button in the actual invitation that gets sent. You can add more than one button here, with the caveat that they all have different URLs specified in the url parameter; ...