CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaandroidfacebookandroid-contacts
Érik Desjardins
Érik Desjardins

Reputation: 993

Android - Get a contact's Facebook picture

Android platform is really fun to work with especially when it comes to resolving issues. Indeed, there is possibly everything there is to know about Android development on the internet.

Alright, I've been searching for about a week and haven't found anything that was close from working. Let's dive into it.

We are building an Android Application that requires a read/write access to existing Contacts on a device. It has become really easy to read a contact's set photo using this method : 

// Returns a stream reading a contact thumbnail
public InputStream getContactThumbnail(int id) {
    // Stream reading contact image
    InputStream stream = ContactsContract.Contacts.openContactPhotoInputStream(
        context.getContentResolver(), 
        ContentUris.withAppendedId(
            ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_URI, id
        )
    );

    // If image is null, try to read Facebook image
    if (stream == null) {
        stream = new ByteArrayInputStream(getFacebookPhoto(id));
    }

    return stream;
}

Now, the previous method receives an id as a parameter and returns a Stream making it possible to read the contact's thumbnail. It is needed to be a stream because the phone acts like a web server and has multiple threads running. If a thumbnail is requested several times in the same short time lapse, an OutOfMemoryException will be thrown for sure.

I need to correctly implement the getFacebookPhoto(int) method so that it returns whatever stream reading the Facebook profile picture of a contact that has his or her contact linked with his or her respective Facebook profile. I've tried and failed so many times.

Hypothesis #1

If a contact is linked with a Facebook profile, it has to have the Facebook ID saved somewhere. If this information is accessible, it would make it easy to get a Facebook profile picture using graph. Problem is an internet connection is needed to do so.

Hypothesis #2

Facebook thumbnails are saved somewhere on the SD card. Maybe there's a link between a Contact and those files that can be found through an SQLite request?

Hypothesis #3

sigh, I look desperate. Okay, if I understood correctly, a phone Contact and a Facebook Contact are not the same things in the database. If you query all the contacts from the following URI : *ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_URI* you only get contacts that you created and nothing regarding Facebook links. Is there a way to find all linked contacts and get their respective photos?

Conclusion

Yeah, that's about is. To sum it up, I need to read all contacts information. For each contact, I have to find its photo. If the user has not set a picture to a contact that is linked to a Facebook profile, the profile picture which it was linked too must be read.

Up until now, the StackOverflow community has been of a great help and saved my life and job countless times. It is possible, I've seen it in other apps.

Thank you for spending of your time, it is truly appreciated.

EDIT

Let's not give up! I will start a 100pts bounty as soon as I can.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 781

Answers (3)

Pete42
Pete42

Reputation: 906

You should really go and play around with Graph Explorer on the Facebook Developers site it will help you a lot in figuring out what you need to do to get certain things. In order to get the picture for an person you just have to do is do a simple GET HTTPRequest with the graph path of /ID?fields=picture (where ID is the facebook id of the contact) which will return a JSON object that contains the link to that person's profile picture. From there it should be fairly simple for you to get the image.

You can also do the same thing to get all of a person's friends with the picture information by sending a GET request to /me/friends?fields=picture. It seems like you are trying to avoid a web connection but if the android contacts do not store the facebook id then you will have to get the ids yourself I'm afraid.

Hope that helps.

Upvotes: 0

CR Sardar
CR Sardar

Reputation: 1018

Your hypothesises are right to a certain extend. In contact application this things are handled as folows -

  1. Device's Contact & its Facebook account are mapped by Contact's _ID & Facebook's id, this is one-to-one mapping. So from this mapping first you have to find out the Facebook id of the conserned contact. But in which table this info is stored & wheather that table is eposed to you or not, URL to that table completely dependent on vendors.

  2. From Facebook Id we can get corresponding profile image either from Facebook's server or from Media DB, if it is also cached in.

But this is not supported by all OEMs. And implementation varies from OEM to OEM as Google don't enforce for any common standard implementation of it. So there is no garantee that a single implementation will work for all devices from different OEMs.

Upvotes: 3

Nishant Mahajan
Nishant Mahajan

Reputation: 264

Why don't you use FQL, for Android you can use - 

String query = "SELECT uid, name, pic, pic_small, pic_big FROM user WHERE uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me())";

Bundle params = new Bundle();
params.putString("method", "fql.query");
params.putString("query", query);
mAsyncFacebookRunner.request(null, params, new CustomRequestListener());

where CustomRequestListener() extends RequestListener in the Facebook Android SDK.

Upvotes: -1

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