How to access Messenger User Profile?

[ajith007]

What is the best way to retrieve the User Profile info in Messenger using Botkit?
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/user-profile

I'm trying to greet the user by the FB profile first name.

[PierreMarieRiviere]

In the greeting thread, you can refer to the user's ID by using {{user_name}}

controller.api.thread_settings.greeting('Hello {{user_name}}! Please meet our Facebook chatbot!');

You can try {{user_first_name}} or {{user_last_name}} as well, or refer to any feature of the user's public profile. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/permissions

[ajith007]

Thanks devhaoy for the quick response!

I tried your suggestion and it worked fine on the welcome/greeting/home page. In fact, I wanted to greet the user with the first name every time the user starts a conversation with the bot by saying hello or hi. Sorry, I wasn't clear earlier. I tried as below, but didn't work.

controller.hears(['hello','hi'], 'message_received', function(bot, message) {
		var msgAttachment = {
			'type':'template',
			'payload':{
				'template_type':'generic',
				'elements':[
					{
						'title':'Hi **{{user_first_name}}**!',
						'subtitle':'What would you like to do?',
						'buttons':[
							{
							  'type':'postback',
							  'title':'Read a Joke',
							  'payload':'joke'
							},
							{
							  'type':'postback',
							  'title':'Listen to Music',
							  'payload':'music'
							},
							{
							  'type':'postback',
							  'title':'Play a Game',
							  'payload':'game'
							}
						]
					}
				]
			}
		};

		bot.reply(message,{
		  attachment: msgAttachment 
		});
	});

[benbrown]

This may be the built in template parser getting in the way of the Facebook tags, which use the same {{}} syntax. I'll do some testing.

[ajith007]

Thanks Ben! Let me know the best way to retrieve the profile info.

[PierreMarieRiviere]

I don't think Botkit is the cause of the issue. Seems the {{user_name}} tag is only available within the greeting message.
My understanding is you must call to the Graph API to get the user's public profile in the conversation. Here is a sample code you can use in the convo:

var request = require('request'); // make http call

getUserName = function(response, convo) {
var usersPublicProfile = 'https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/' + response.user + '?fields=first_name,last_name,profile_pic,locale,timezone,gender&access_token=' + process.env.page_token;
request({
    url: usersPublicProfile,
    json: true // parse
}, function (error, response, body) {
        if (!error && response.statusCode === 200) {
            convo.say('Hi ' + body.first_name);
        }
    });
};

This call grants access to the user's public profile only, depending on what you request in the url. Would be super nice if we had a native Login flow built in our Botkit :)

[ajith007]

Great! That worked very well. Thanks devhaoy! 👍

Yes, would have been nice if we could retrieve the public profile info without making the http call to Graph API. :)

[peterswimm]

Marking this as a enhancement request for Botkit, if anyone wants to take a stab as at PR.

[znat]

I wrote this middleware to populate a user_profile field with the facebook profile in inbound the message.

[pibicalderon]

Do I have to make the http call each time I want to use the user information in a chatbot in the same conversation?

[znat]

@pibicalderon it saves the user profile to the storage to avoid making several API calls