I have some code like the following in my application:
message = "Hi, @John Doe!"
postID = fb.stream.publish(
message = loader.render_to_string('wall_post.phtml', {'message':message}),
action_links = simplejson.dumps([{'text': "Check out blah", 'href': "http://blah.dev"}]),
target_id = 'nf'
)
Is there any way to represent a facebook @mention in the message string so that facebook converts it to a profile link for the mentioned user?
I've also been looking for an answer to this. The facebook website uses the format:
@[139730900025:PhotoGrabber] is awesome
to represent the links but I haven't been able to make that work. I re-posted a thread on the facebook forum under the "Stream" category since your post wasn't getting any attention:
I'm pretty sure this is impossible at the moment. If it were posible by using the format that tam7t suggested it should work... Your best bet is asking them to add that to their api stream parser.
This actually is a real feature, Critter Island uses it actively alongside their gifting feature. Any ideas??
I'm thinking the best approach at the moment would be to write a screen scraper to do these posts using the format described by tam7t's answer. If you use the mobile version of facebook's site (m.facebook.com) it makes it much easier.
The only thing I don't know at the moment is if this is a violation of Facebook's Application TOS.
Edit: Here is some ruby code that will do the trick, using the Mechanize Gem
require 'mechanize'
agent = Mechanize.new
agent.user_agent_alias = 'Mac Safari'
page = agent.get('http://m.facebook.com')
form = page.forms.first
# enter credentials
form.pass = 'user password'
form.email = '[email protected]'
page = agent.submit form
# go straight to page to post on
page = agent.get("http://m.facebook.com/wall.php?id=PAGE_ID_NUM")
form = page.forms.first
form.message = "@[139730900025:PhotoGrabber] is awesome"
page = agent.submit form
That said, back to the original question of putting an @mention in a wall post, I have noticed that whilst the post and @mention go up on the wall fine, this method does not propagate the post to the mentioned user/page's wall. Not sure if that is important to you.