Hi,
I'm a newb fb dev trying to setup my app. I'd like to extract stuff from the personal info fields, but can't; instead i get xsi:nil values for the personal info fields. Neither my application nor the test console works in this regard. I am making requests with the user id of my personal account which i am logged in as, so I don't think its a privacy problem.
for users.getinfo with fields activities,interests,tv,movies,books
test console gives me
<activities xsi:nil="true"/>
<interests xsi:nil="true"/>
<tv xsi:nil="true"/>
<movies xsi:nil="true"/>
<books xsi:nil="true"/>
the docs indicate that you sometimes get xsi:nil for privacy related reasons, but i dont think thats the case here as im querying on my own user id. using the same method to get first_name, last_name, and even religion works just fine.
help!
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Yes this problem has just begun happening to me after months of working correctly.
I have music listed in my profile, and I am returned a nil value for music now. Books, movies, interests and things such as significant other are also affected.
The call is being made with my working application ID, and the session key being used is the one belonging to the user in question (myself in my tests). Many other correct fields are being returned in the resultant xml from Users.getInfo(), but not the ones I want, primarily the ones on the personal section of the profile.
I have tried making sure that the user targetted by the getInfo call has both an infinite session and is logged into my application, although that shouldn't matter. When adding the app I had every possible permission checked both when logging in, and adding the app (ie App can access my personal info, app knows who I am etc).
This problem just began sometime yesterday.
The problem reproduces in the Test Console app also, using the test console app id, and my app id.
Does anyone know what is happening? Is this a private information policy change by faceboook or a bug?
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OK, well I can rule out my own incompetence.
I suspect FB has disabled this functionality to prevent data mining, but haven't updated the docs. Perhaps someone with more experience than myself could file a bug.
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Can someone from Facebook tell us if this behavior is due to a policy change or a bug?
Last edited by dcferguson (2008-03-20 15:23:16)
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I assume they would have posted about it in developer news if it is a change of policy.
I also have to add that this doesn't happen for all of my users. The user info call succeeds in returning favorite music for some users, most of which don't actually have my app installed at all. I can use my session key to get_userInfo() on a friends uid, which succeeds for some people.
I'm going to investigate if the successes on users are people who have wide open to the public profiles, or something similar to that.
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Note that before making this thread I had tested on a brand new account with default privacy settings and it didn't work, which implies that if it is a privacy problem due to a new requirement, we can no longer extract those fields for the majority of users.
However, based on your observation that its partial behaviour, I'm more inclined to guess it is a bug, especially if FB are usually civil about this kind of thing
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I just confirmed that the users in which the userInfo call is succeeding still, are people who have their entire profiles open to the public.
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More confirmation that it only succeeds on users who have their personal profile information open to everyone, and fails for everyone else.
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Ok, cancel those confirmations, I have no idea what's happening now.
Very confused.
Last edited by saf (2008-03-20 16:04:48)
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I set my test account to allow friends of friends to view profile and personal info .. and it started working
then I started setting it back to friends only and it .. continued to work. so I am also confused.
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Thank god I'm not going insane! I only finished an app 4 days ago, it was working fine, and I came back to try launch it over this weekend and it doesn't work! I thought I had messed up the code somehow.
I did a simple test there, the app couldn't get my data. I changed the first few of my privacy settings to "friends of friends", refreshed the page and my data was showing up!
Considering that this error started happening the exact same time that facebook relaunched their privacy initiative i'd be 99% certain that that's causing the problem. Here's hoping that it's a bug and not a policy change.
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We've opened up a bug report on the bug tracker for this. Please post additional information on the bug in there.
Matt Choi
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Posted to the Platform Status Feed (http://www.facebook.com/developers/message.php):
getInfo() call failure
Mar 20, 2008 10:34pm
There is a recent bug where some users are no longer seeing the Personal Info section of their friends’ profiles. There is a related Platform problem; in some instances the getInfo() call does not return information for certain items (such as interests and activities), even when using it on yourself. We are working on a fix.
Sorry for the trouble,
Facebook Platform Developer Operations & Support
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