Problem with access token while creating Facebook Test Users

Question

I'm trying to create test users for my Facebook application. They announced this functionality in this blog post in November (http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/429) and it is documented here (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/). I could not find the answer to this elsewhere...

According to the documentation, "You can create a test user associated with a particular application using the Graph API with the application access token." This links to the section "Autenticating as an Application" and describes this CURL script:

curl -F grant_type=client_credentials \
 -F client_id=your_app_id \
 -F client_secret=your_app_secret \
 https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token

So far, so good. I ran this and get the following:

access_token=1182...18|nTI...r5Q

So now I want to POST this token to the graph api test user URL:

POST /1182...18/accounts/test-users?installed=true&permissions=read_stream&access_token=1182...18|nTI...r5Q  

When I do this (both using the Facebook PHP SDK and just typing it into the browser) I get:

{
    "error": {
      "type": "OAuthException",
      "message": "Invalid OAuth access token."
    }
}

So the questions are:

Why am I getting this error message?

Am I using the wrong access token (despite Facebook explicitly telling me to use this one?)

Do I need to parse the access token somehow?

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

Here is some working code that will allow you to create a test user with the PHP SDK.

Answer 2

Ensure your access token is properly urlencoded when passing back to facebook.

Answer 3

I was getting this error until I removed some parameters from example code I saw floating around. Here is an example in python using requests that I finally managed to get working:

# Get the access token
resp = requests.get(
    'https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?grant_type=client_credentials&client_id={app_id}&client_secret={app_secret}'.format(
        app_id=APP_ID, # Your app id (found in admin console)
        app_secret=APP_SECRET  # Your app secret (found in admin console)
    )
)
# Parse the token
token = resp.content.split('=')[-1]

# Create the user
data = {'access_token': str(token)}
resp = requests.post(
    'https://graph.facebook.com/{app_id}/accounts/test-users?installed=true'.format(
        app_id=APP_ID
    ),
    data=data
)
print resp.content