API Tab

When you first arrive at the Tools page, you are presented with two tabs. The API tab has many of the API calls available to you so you can see what kind of data is being returned. I find it useful in my day-to-day programming to be able to see the data I expect to have returned in order to speed development.

let’s take a look at a simple call to return a list of your friends. Simply select the friends.get option for the Method field. This will return an XML structure with a root element of <friends_get_response>. You’ll also notice a couple of XML namespaces and a location for the schema. If you run into issues with the responses, remember how you’re getting them. If it’s XML, you might need to deal with the root XML attributes.

The Facebook API Test Console as shown in the figure is a great place to click around and see what different calls will return. Not only can you switch between the different API calls, but you can also change response formats to see what you will get when you change the Response Format field. As you experiment with the different calls, you’ll notice that some requests require additional fields. And, if you don’t fill out the required fields, Facebook will return error codes in the different response formats.