CFHTTP "Could Not Determine MIME Type of File" Error with FacebookGraph API

I'm finishing up the Facebook and Twitter integration for the OpenCF Summit application we'll be launching soon, and I was running into an error when calling the Facebook Graph API via CFHTTP.

If you've worked with Facebook you're probably aware that once a user logs into Facebook via your application, a cookie gets set that contains an access token you can use to grab additional details about the Facebook user via the Graph API. You make a simple HTTP call to http://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token and you get JSON back containing the details about the user that they have authorized you to retrieve.

The first issue I ran into is if the access token contains a pipe you may get a "Failed to set URL:Invalid query" error (and thanks to Andy Wu for pointing out to me that was the issue!). Simple enough to fix by putting the access token into a CFHTTPPARAM tag:

<cfhttp url="https://graph.facebook.com/me">
    <cfhttpparam type="url" name="access_token" value="cookie_value_here" />
</cfhttp>


That fixed the invalid query error, but then the response I was getting back had a filecontent of "Connection failed." It worked fine in my browser so I wasn't sure what was going on, but the mimetype of the response was "Unable to determine MIME type of file" so that gave me a bit of a clue.

CFHTTPPARAM to the rescue again. Setting a MIMETYPE header with a value of text/javscript did the trick:

<cfhttp url="https://graph.facebook.com/me">
    <cfhttpparam type="url" name="access_token" value="cookie_value_here" />
    <cfhttpparam type="header" name="mimetype" value="text/javascript" />
</cfhttp>

Hope that saves someone else a bit of time if they run into a similar issue.