Send facebook notification after invitation request

Posted by mahmud ahsan on September 26, 2009 Facebook, PHP

Sometimes people ask me how to send notification in facebook app after invitation request processed.

This is a very easy solutions. You just need to carefully look the api request and return value. Then you can easily integrate the solution

Here I’m describing what is invitation, what is request and how to send notification after invitation/request successfully processed.

There are many viral features in facebook platform, by using those you can easily inform others about your application. Here I mention 2 of these

1. notification
2. invitation

So what is invitation?
Look at these figures:

when some one send you any page/application/group invitation or request you’ll see like this figure at the right+top in your facebook homepage.

In application level, how will you integrate this?
According to http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:multi-friend-selector_(condensed)

if you use this code

<div style="padding: 10px;">
  <fb:request-form method="post" action="index.php" content="hey" type="sample" invite="true">
    <div class="clearfix" style="padding-bottom: 10px;">
      <fb:multi-friend-selector condensed="true" selected_rows="0" style="width: 200px;" />
    </div>
    <fb:request-form-submit />
  </fb:request-form>
</div>

you’ll see the following component in your facebook canvas page:

So users can easily send invitation/request to their  friends using this widget in your facebook app.

According to http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:multi-friend-selector if you use this code

<fb:fbml>
      <fb:request-form action="" method="POST" invite="true" type="appname" content="body of the message">
      <fb:multi-friend-selector showborder="false" rows="5"  exclude_ids="" actiontext="Invite your friends to use this app">
      </fb:request-form>
    </fb:fbml>

you’ll see the following widget in your facebook canvas page:

So using this widget users can easily send invitation/request to their friends about your app. So what happen when someone send invitation/request using any of these 2 widgets?

The friends who will get invitation/request will see  in their home page like below:

There will no notification will trigger for invitation/request.
So what is notification?

Notification is like this:

Now if you want when user will send invitation/request the receiver user will also get notification then how will you implement that?

If you read this 2 pages carefully: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:multi-friend-selector_(condensed) or http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:multi-friend-selector you’ll see:

POST Variables

What does it mean?

It means, if invitation/request processed successfully facebook will send a variable ids that means receiver friends uids (comma separated list).

So now, if you want after invitation/request processed you’ll additionally send notifications to those users who are invited/requested you can code like this:

<?php if(!empty($_REQUEST['ids'])) {
        echo "Your invitation processed successfully!";

        include_once "facebook.php";
        include_once "config.php";

        $uids = isset($_REQUEST['ids']) ? $_REQUEST['ids'] : "";

        try{
             if (!empty($uids))
                    $facebook->api_client->notifications_send($uids, 'some info', 'user_to_user');
        }
        catch(Exception $o){
             print_r($o);
        }
   } else { ?>
    <fb:fbml>
      <fb:request-form action="" method="POST" invite="true" type="appname" content="body of the message">
      <fb:multi-friend-selector showborder="false" rows="5"  exclude_ids="" actiontext="Invite your friends to use this app">
      </fb:request-form>
    </fb:fbml>
   <?php } ?>

For more info regarding notifications: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Notifications.send

So, the logic is, after processed invitation/request you’ll get user ids, and you’ll send notification to those ids.

Have fun!

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Tags: facebook invitation, facebook notification, notification, send notification after invitation request