Programming Social Applications

Implementation Example: Requesting More User Information in the Facebook OAuth Process

I mentioned at a few points throughout the OAuth 2 Facebook examples that we would dive deeper into the topic of scopes. You might remember that we used the scope parameter in the URI where the user was forwarded to go through the authorization flow:

//construct Facebook auth URI
$auth_url = $authorization_endpoint
          . "?redirect_uri=" . $callback_url
          . "&client_id=" . $key
          . "&scope=email,publish_stream,manage_pages,friends_about_me";

The purpose of the scope parameter is to allow an application to request certain social information from a user.

Note

Some providers bind these scopes directly to the application ID or key issued when you first create your application instead of dynamically in the initial OAuth request token request. This means that they do not require a scope parameter in that initial request. Providing the scope parameter, such as in this Facebook implementation, allows you to define scopes in a very dynamic manner.

Facebook includes an extensive number of scopes that we can include as a comma-separated list in the authorization request.

Data permissions

Data permissions will allow your application to access information about a user, or a user’s friends (in the form of a friend request), as shown in Table 9-10.

Table 9-10. Data permissions

User permission	Friend permission	Description
ads_management	Not available	Enables your application to manage ads and call the Facebook Ads API on the user’s ...