Is it possible to “Like” a “fan page” using the Facebook SDK?

Question

I am trying to let users "like" a Facebook fan page from within an Android app. I am able to successfully "like" objects such as wall comments using code like this,

mFacebook = new Facebook(APP_ID);   
SessionStore.restore(mFacebook, this);        

mAsyncRunner = new AsyncFacebookRunner(mFacebook);
Bundle parameters = new Bundle();
mAsyncRunner.request(COMMENT_ID + "/likes", parameters, "POST", new MyRequestListener(), "");

However, if I put in a page id rather than a comment id, I get this error message in the Facebook response,

Response: {"error":{"type":"OAuthException","message":"(#200) App does not have permission to make this call"}}

I am obtaining both the "publish_stream" and "offline_access" publishing permissions at login, and they are given to the Facebook object with SessionStore.restore().

1) Does Facebook let apps "like" fan pages?

2) If so, any ideas on what I am doing wrong?

Thanks, Matt

Answer 1

The Facebook documentation for Pages has been updated and is current (see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/page/). You cannot like a Page via the Graph API, even though you can read the like count information.

Answer 2

As other answers say, it is not possible to 'like' pages via the Graph API.

The confusion in this topic comes from the API documentation, where is says You can comment on or like any object that has a /comments or /likes connection (The key term here is connection)

Going a little deeper: Any object (in this case a Page), has a number of Fields and Connections. Fields are basically used to access the object information and Connections are used to perform operations in that object.

In sum, a Page doesn't have a /likes Connection, but it has a /likes Field, reason why we can get the number of likes of a given page, but we cannot like a page.

Answer 3

Unfortunately, as far as I know so far, you can't like Pages via the API. You can render a Like button via a web view, but I think you're out of luck here at least. You can (as you note) like comments and posts, but pages still require direct user interaction.