Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Creating Scripts to Access Offline Data

After you have permissions to access user data, you get to do cool things with that data. One of the most powerful permissions that you can get from a user is the offline_access permission. This permission allows your application almost indefinite access to that user's data, even when he or she is not logged in to Facebook. The only way for the user to turn off your access is to go into his privacy settings and revoke access to your application.

Making offline calls is just like making calls when you're interacting with the user online. You just pass in the oauth_token parameter to Graph API, and Facebook gives you the data you need.

Here are some useful things you can do with offline_access:

• Find out information about your users: Some Web sites like to process stats about demographics, age, gender, interests, and more about their users. If you have a database full of Facebook IDs and access tokens, you can run a script on a regular basis that makes Graph API calls to get information about each of those users. You can then report that in useful ways.
• Queue requests for later: It doesn't always make sense to make a request to Facebook at the exact time that the user requests to do so. For example, perhaps the user wants to publish something to Facebook, but she's on a cell phone and doesn't have access at the time she wants to publish. You can queue up her request and use her permanent token to publish the request to her feed later.

As always, ...