In the past, I think a Facebook Page access token could be generated manually, and then used with the graph API to query posts, comments, likes, shares, etc. Now it seems you cannot query anything without developing an app that I login to and then in turn the app generates the access token. Is that true? For example, this question from 2015 claims no access token is needed for public data, but when I try their example it returns "An access token is required to request this resource."
I'm the admin of my page that ran a basic contest (giveaway). I'd like to use the graph API to fetch the names of people that liked, shared, or commented on a post. Then I want to cross reference it with those that like the page. Do I have to register and develop an app for this? Does my page have an access token available without going through the app registration and review process?
Can I access a Facebook Page with the Graph API without creating an app?
No, that is not possible. You always have to use an App for any API Access.
Then I want to cross reference it with those that like the page.
That is not possible either, not even with an App. I assume you want to make sure that participants like your Page - which is not allowed. People cannot be "incentivized" to like your Page.
Platform Policy: https://developers.facebook.com/policy/
Explanation about the specific rule against requiring people to like your Page: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/examples-platform-policy-4.5
Related
(I'm aware of this question, but it's outdated to the point of no longer working, so asking again.)
With the Facebook API it used to be that all profile pictures were considered public, and you could get one for anyone without any access tokens like this:
https://graph.facebook.com/4/picture
Now in 2020 it seems that it only works for public images like Zuck there. I have a tool for Facebook page admins that shows a list of people who liked page posts, but when I try to show user pictures in the list they all now come up blank because "This object does not exist or does not support this action".
The docs now say "This document refers to a feature that was removed after Graph API v3.2". But I could not find any more information about this deprecation. Is it now just impossible to show the picture of a user without having a user access token, or has the way to call it just changed?
The feature has not been removed, but now for users that don't have their profiles set as public, you need to provide an access token.
For instance suppose you use the Page API to list all the people who commented on a post. Previously you could show the profile pics of commenters by just linking to https://graph.facebook.com/<UID>/picture. However now you need an access token for that Page, and to then access the pic as https://graph.facebook.com/<UID>/picture?access_token=<TOKEN HERE>.
I have not tested this with apps, but I would assume that also to get the profile pics of app users based on their app-scoped UID, you'd need to include an access token there as well.
I am planning to build a small side project that stores posts from particular public pages. And detect if they delete the post later. Something similar has been done for Twitter. But I couldn't find similar projects for Facebook.
Like this: http://politwoops.sunlightfoundation.com/
But for Twitter. I will do it in Python or C#
How can I go about it?
Any particular code or projects I can learn from?
The only way to check if a post is not there anymore on Facebook is to search for it with a User Access Token of the User who posted it. Every Object on Facebook gets a specific ID, you only have to check if that ID still exists. If not, you get an Error from the API.
For example: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/?method=GET&path=10203433018378479&version=v2.0
The path parameter is the ID of the Post.
Keep in mind that you need the read_stream permission for that, and you need to let Facebook approve it for other users or it will only work for Admins/Devs of your App. It is not very likely that you will get the permission approved for this though. It usually only gets approved for Apps on "Platforms without a native Facebook experience".
Edit: My bad, i was thinking about User posts, but your question was about Pages. In that case, all you need is an App Access Token (App-ID|App-Secret). The API Call would be the same, you just need to know the Post ID.
About Access Tokens:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/access-tokens/
http://www.devils-heaven.com/facebook-access-tokens/
For getting the feed of a Facebook Page, see the Facebook docs (including code samples): https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.0/page/feed/
You can use graph api for this. If it's a public page, you can follow these steps:
Create your application in Facebook developers site
Setup the basic graph auth mechanism with your favorite language and get unexpired token.
Use your unexpired access token to do these tasks:
Enter the id of the pages you want to crawl http://graph.facebook.com/[insert page id or url here]/feed
Add post title, postID to your database.
Create a scheduled task on your server to do these tasks:
Select all / page based etc posts on your database and send a request to: http://graph.facebook.com/[insert post ID here]
if it returns it means it's still there. otherwise it will return an error.
We have a Facebook Application with custom Open Graph objects and actions.
We then use a App Access Token to post stories for a particular user from our backend with the normal Open Graph REST API. After the post-call succeeds we log the returned "id" of that post.
Now we would like to collect insight data (e.g. post_impressions_unique) for some of these individual posts/stories using the logged id's.
According to https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/573/ we should be able to do something like:
https://graph.facebook.com/[POST ID]/insights
Even though this call seems to work using our normal App Access Token, no insight data is returned for the post/story.
Does anyone know if this is possible and how to do it?
We have been experimenting with a normal User Access Token and the "read_insights" permissions, but with no luck. I have read some similar questions but mainly regarding page-posts (this is an App Open Graph post/story).
EDIT:
The facebook article above only refers to "Page" posts. I'm looking for analytics on individual Facebook App Opengraph Posts/stories. It seems difficult to find any good information about this, has nobody attempted this with any success?
You must add insights into a permissions/Extended permissions
Article :
Getting Page Insights
In order to obtain Page Insights via the Graph API, you must use a Page access token, and you must have the read_insights permission. Click on the link below to see this working in the Graph API Explorer.
Can I use the Facebook Graph API without the creation of my Facebook Application? As I understand it, for each operation I need to use the OAuth key. And I can only get user OAuth key if they authorize my Facebook application. Am I right?
I need to get user feed, and post to it.
Facebook Graph Api needs your APP ID which you can only get from your Facebook application. So i think its not possible to post data on facebook without having Application ID.
You can use this tool to dynamically generate an access_token for testing: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/
Also, check out RapidAPI here. I've specifically linked you to the FacebookGraphAPI block. Here you can instantaneously connect to numerous Facebook endpoints. The platform will generate a code snippet that you can directly insert into your code.
Depends on what you want to do, for most tasks you have to have an app id... but If you want to get the amount of shares for a certain page, for example, you can do it with no app ID.
I think there is FBML (facebooks mark up language) which you can embed on your site which can handle some basic tasks like commenting or liking.
No, You can't do that as Facebook Graph API needs access token which u can get only by authorising your logged-in user by your (Created) App in Facebook.
I'm trying to get a user to 'Like' a page via the SDK. User is signed in and I get a valid access tokken form the cookie. My APP has asked for permissions read_stream and publish_stream. I can successfully do things like post to their wall, etc. But when my APP tries to 'Like' a page, I get the error back:
OAuthException: (#3) Application does not have the capability to make this API call.
Am I missing some other permission, or is there a setting I have to turn on in my APP? I'm at a loss here.
You can't like a Page on behalf of a user (Bugzilla discussion). You can, however, like posts, comments, and photos on behalf of a user.
Edit 7/9/2012
Since bugzilla no long exists, the bug linked above is inaccessible. Google doesn't have a cached version of the page, so I ran another search. The best thing I could come up with was this Google Code Discussion regarding the ActionScript API.
Facebook makes brief mention of Publishing likes via the Graph API in the documentation, but doesn't say one way or another whether you can like a Page on behalf of a user - just "Objects" which (probably arguably) are not "objects" in Facebook-lingo.
My thought is, the API to like page is available, but is only offered to white listed applications (such as, the Facebook iOS and Android applications) written by "special" publishers. There's obvious reasons why Facebook wouldn't want/allow developers to create like connections on the graph. It would be taken advantage of by spammers and other nefarious developers and would deteriorate the meaning of what a "like" represents for a page on Facebook.
My guess is, you'd have to make a pretty strong case to Facebook about why you need/want access to the Page's Like connection (for publishing) before they'd even consider giving you access. I'd also guess that they'd want to verify that you're doing only user initiated like creations (in such a way that the iOS application would handle it) so as to protect the reptutation/meaning of a "like" action.
Actually this is NOT true, but you have to do a complicated Javascript / UIWebView process in order to display a Facebook 'page' of JUST the like button on your view, and this like button you can configure in the JavaScript / Objective-C (using string replacement) to be any Facebook page url you like.
Facebook's platform policies don't allow for a web-based like button aside from using the officially supported options
Those options doesn't require using OAuth or the Open Graph api. However, facebook just added support for mobile apps to send like actions through opengraph.
I'm not sure if they intend to allow sites to customize their like buttons or just apps...
Liking works for me with the iOS SDK using the graph api:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/builtin/likes/