Client.getAllUsers() about fbchat

[dstelzer]

Re feasibility: names and IDs are returned from threadlist_info.php: you can iterate over data['payload']['participants'], which has keys fbid and name, and make a dictionary of them.

Unfortunately, Facebook will only give you the most recent ~80 threads. So this method will only get participants in the most recent 80 conversations.

[Schmavery]

What does "all users" even mean? All friends of the bot? All participants of a specific conversation? Like @dstelzer called out, there are some limitations here. Afaik it's pretty hard to have an api call that mimics the behaviour of the sidebar that shows which friends are active without some logic to maintain state clientside.

[vincent-lg]

What I was hoping to do was quite simple, actually: simply get the bot's friends (or part of it, if the complete list isn't possible). @dstelzer, you mentioned a PHP page, but how to interact with it with the bot isn't obvious to me (I'm not very familiar with the API, and I can't find much documentation on the topic). I tried to use the bot.getThreadList() method, or bot.getThreadInfo with a valid Facebook ID, but it doesn't seem I get the information (although I can find most recent messages, the "name" field is always empty). Did I miss something? Or, more accurately, what did I miss?

Thanks!

[vincent-lg]

I've found a solution. That might not be the best syntax, but here's what I found.

from datetime import datetime
from fbchat import Client, get_json, now, ThreadsURL

class EchoBot(Client):

    def __init__(self,email, password, debug=True, user_agent=None):
        Client.__init__(self,email, password, debug, user_agent)
        self.friends = {}

    def on_message(self, mid, author_id, author_name, message, metadata):
        self.markAsDelivered(author_id, mid) #mark delivered
        self.markAsRead(author_id) #mark read

        name = self.friends.get(author_id, "unknown")
        print repr("{} said {}".format(name, message))

    def findFriends(self):
        timestamp = now()
        date = datetime.now()
        data = {
            'client' : self.client,
            'inbox[offset]' : 0,
            'inbox[limit]' :80,
        }

        r = self._post(ThreadsURL, data)
        if not r.ok or len(r.text) == 0:
            return None

        j = get_json(r.text)

        # Get friends' names
        for participant in j['payload']['participants']:
            self.friends[participant["fbid"]] = participant["name"]


bot = EchoBot("...", "...")
bot.findFriends()
bot.listen()
'''

The `findFriends` method is the same as `getThreadList`, at the beginning.  Where it defers is that the JSON response is used to create the dictionary of friends.  That may be worth adding in the `getThreadList` method itself.

[pirelle]

I've made a pull request, idea was taken from https://github.com/Schmavery/facebook-chat-api/blob/master/src/getFriendsList.js