In my previous tutorial, I presented an easy and fast way to implement the login with Facebook feature. Based on the FBLoginView class, I demonstrated how logging in and out from Facebook can be done in really a few minutes with the assistance of a predefined login button. In this tutorial we’ll do the exact same thing, but this time we won’t use any automatic solution. Instead, we will implement every part of the login process manually and we’ll see in some detail level how everything works when connecting to Facebook. That’s a useful knowledge to have, as there are many cases that the default login view we saw in the last tutorial isn’t handful at all.
Before we start programming, it is necessary to present some basic terms, so you’ve got an idea about the whole process. The first important thing you should know, is that after a successful login with Facebook the app receives an access token. This is a unique key, that allows to perform requests and exchange data with Facebook in a secure fashion, without having to authorize the app all the time. One could say that the whole login hassle happens just to get that access token. Once received, and depending on the permissions your app asks for, you can freely get and send data.
