implementing facebook search in application

Question

I need to design a search box in my facebook desktop application, with functionality same as that of facebook search.

If a name say 'sam' is entered, then all users in whose name 'sam' comes should get listed.

Same as the output of this sql query: select uid, name from users where name like '%sam%'.

Is there any way to implement this?

Answer 1

you could do it by hand, but doing it right can be a pretty big difficult task.

looking at the fb dev wiki though, I just came across this. it looks like it will use the facebook typeahead widget with whatever options you want. So you can gather the friendlist via friends.get or an fql query, then render some XFBML with a FB typeahead widget.

it looks like that tag is in beta and has some open bug reports, but it's probably worth it to give it a shot before going to all the trouble of doing the typeahead yourself.