Our app recently started getting throttled by Facebook's API. We found out that the issue was actually that it was possible for our app to get into a state where it repeatedly called FB.XFBML.parse in quick succession. As shown in this pastebin example (paste into fbrell) to test), Facebook's library does not cache lookups so if you call FB.XFBML.parse multiple times it naively spams the API with requests.

This library also combines up to 50 name lookups into a single API request by using the ?ids=4,5,6 format supported by the graph API (rather splitting it into a batch of 50 requests like the Official Facebook JavaScript library does).

All in all this should result in a speedier, more efficient, more resilient implementation of a custom tag name lookup.

Requirements

• Facebook JavaScript SDK
• Underscore.js
• jQuery.js

Usage

Add an f:name tag to the DOM like so:

<f:name uid="4">Loading...</f:name>

Initialize the Facebook JS library then call FBName.parse(). This will automatically replace your f:name tags with the name for the user ID pulled from Facebook's API.

The above HTML will be transformed to

<f:name uid="4">Mark Zuckerburg</f:name>