Getting a users Facebook profile url

Question

I am creating a registry site so similar people can find each other easily. I don't want to use Facebook Connect as the primary log in method or use Facebook to store their information. I'll be creating a database on my end to store that info. For security reasons I won't be displaying the users address, phone number or email address so I wanted to provide the next best way for people to connect with each other, this is where Facebook comes in. Normally I would just ask them to type their Facebook URL in a text box but I don't think most people know what their url is which is why I think I need to use Facebook Connect. So here is my idea..when the users signs up there is a check box that when checked signifies they are allowing people to find them on Facebook. I assume once they click the register button that a Facebook Connect popup will show up asking for permission to access their Facebook account. When they "allow" it, then I can get their profile url. All I need is their Facebook profile url, I don't want any other Facebook features or information. Is Facebook Connect the best thing to use for this scenario? Is there an easier way? Several months ago on the Facebook Connect site their used to be examples of doing this, but all the documentation has been rearranged and changed and I can't seem to find the information. Any help you can provide would be great!

Answer 1

An easy way to do it will be to ask the user for his FB username. This is not really a private field and any user would be willing to share it. Then the profile link would just be http://www.facebook.com/<username> as you would know already.

However, it is possible that the user may not have a username on Facebook. In that case, you would need to add the FB connect button to your site. But you can keep it simple. Once the user connects, you will get his UID. Just make a GET request to the URL, http://graph.facebook.com/<UID> and you will get the profile URL in the link field of the returned JSON.

To get an idea, just open this in your browser - http://graph.facebook.com/546159339