Tuesday, March 01, 2011

A 30 minute guide to integrating Facebook in your Android application

Introduction
The goal of this article is to get Facebook integration up & running from your Android app in 30 minutes. The guide will show you how to
  • setup a Faceook test account
  • register a Facebook application
  • authenticate the user in your Android application.
  • have the user update his Facebook wall from your Android application.
This guide is accompanied  by a sample application that’s available in Github in the AndroidFacebookSample repository. To import this project in Eclipse, I suggest using the EGit plugin that can be installed via the Main P2 Repository located at http://download.eclipse.org/egit/updates.

Before running this project, make sure you change the com.ecs.android.facebook.Sample.AndroidFacebookSample file to include your Facebook API key (see subsequent section).

Once you have sample application up & running, you can copy the relevant classes into your projects to have Facebook up & running from your Android application.

First things first … In order to integrate with Facebook, you need 2 things :
A Facebook test account, used in our Android application to login to Facebook and make status updates.
A Facebook application, used to inform the user in your Android application that this application is requesting you to login to Facebook.

Facebook Test Account

We’ll start by creating a test account that we’ll use in our Android application. Signup for a new user account at Facebook. If you already have an account, sign up for a new account using your existing name but specify a different email address. Once the account has been created, we’ll convert it into a Facebook test account.
Note : The following step should not be done on your real facebook account. Converting an existing Facebook account into a test account is irreversible, so please ensure that you do the following step with your newly created “dummy” account.

Read more: Do it yourself Android