I have an access token for a page on Facebook. I can view that page’s feed, and individual posts in that feed. But for some reason, I can only request the /sharedposts endpoint for some of them using v2.2 of the Graph API.
The access token has the user_posts and read_stream insights. When I request the shares field I can see more than one post with shares, but when I request [POST_ID]/sharedposts for some of them, I just get an empty data array in response.
Why is this? Are there some gotchas I should be aware of? It’s a tad frustrating that the /sharedposts edge will return returns for some posts but not others using the same access token and API version.
This is a know bug, which still seems to be unsolved.
Basically it should work like you expected, but even with all necessary permission (and even for public posts) it does not return the object with each of the shares.
You probably want to subscribe to the bug here to be noticed once it has been solved:
https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/1404733043148335/
I just posted my insight/workaround for this bug on the bug report that lars.schwarz linked to, but I'll paste it here as well:
/sharedposts will only retrieve public posts or posts from users who have granted your app access. HOWEVER, the endpoint does not seem to query for this intelligently. I'm not sure, but I think the endpoint has a default limit of 25 results. What appears to be happening is that the endpoint queries Facebook's database for 25 posts, then filters that set based on your app's permissions.
What this means is that if the most recent sharedpost your app is allowed to access is 30 posts deep, the endpoint will return an empty data set. If your app is allowed to access one post which is 15 deep, and one that is 30 deep, it will only return the post that is 15 deep.
In order to get around this, you can set a really high limit (I've been using 2000). The problem with this is that if your post has more than 2000 shares, you will still miss stuff. You can't make the limit insanely high, unfortunately, because the endpoint will return an error telling you to query for less data (even if the query would only actually return a handful of posts). Therefore, I've been setting a limit of 2000 and using the "until" parameter to move through the sharedposts chronologically.
Hopefully that helps clear things up. This is a major pain, and an imperfect solution (although it gets 99% of the job done I think). I encourage everyone to file a bug report on this here: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs
It appears that this bug has been around for years, and I was told yesterday that they have no short-term plans to fix it. If we file enough complaints, maybe they'll prioritize it higher.
Related
So I'm struggling to find where this is documented (if at all), but I'm getting the following error message when requesting data from the FB GraphAPI.
"Please reduce the amount of data you're asking for, then retry your request"
The call I'm making is:
/v2.3/user1/posts?fields=object_id&limit=100
If I change it to:
/v2.3/user2/posts?fields=object_id&limit=100
It returns 100 items.
Why would it work for one user, and not the other?
Both requests are authenticated via an access token (not belonging to either user) and I get the same error whether running it from my code, or the Facebook Graph API console of developers.facebook.com
The response from CBroe is correct. Facebook returns this error if it finds that too many internal resources are needed to respond to your request.
Therefore you have to do what the response says: limit it.
This can be done in (afaik) 2 ways:
Use the limit parameter and reduce the amount of responses you expect from the API
Provide a timeframe (using since and / or until) to fetch only data (posts / videos) for a specific timeframe.
We had the same issue as you, but with retrieving videos from a page. Unfortunately using the limit parameter did not work, even when I set it to limit=1. But by using the since / until parameters we finally got results.
Therefore I suggest to implement a timeframe in order to reduce the amount of data, or alternatively, split the amount of requests you make. e.g. if you want all posts from the past 3 months and run into the mentioned error: split your requests in half using since and until. If that still does not work: keep splitting...
=> Divide and conquer ;)
Hope it helps,
KR, ebbmo
Recent bug filed on FB talks about the same error. They seem to accept that this could be a bug, but not much other information forthcoming.
https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/1904674066421189/
There are both app-level and user-level rate limits that are enforced on Graph API calls. In your case, it could be that you've made a large number of calls in a short time with user1.
You can check out this page for more about Facebook's rate limits: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/api-rate-limiting (even though the URL refers to the Marketing API, the information also applies to the Graph API.)
A question than has been floating around is how to get the list of IDs of people that like a page (here, or here, for instance). From previous answers (and reading the FB API docs...) I am convinced that to be impossible.
However, that is not what I'm after. I don't need the user_ids at all. I just need the number of likes of a page, per city (or some subdivision of a country). There is a field for a Page for the total number of likes, which obviously isn't enough. Insights should provide this, but while page_fans_country works ok as the info is public, page_fans_city returns no results, so I'd need a different way of getting the information.
Is there a query (or set of queries) that would work? Either Graph API or FQL would be fine, at this point.
As to your first statement, I have found that to be correct aswell. My current solution includes, as it has to, external storage.
On to your actual question, it is possible via the Insights API you've found yourself. Rather than moving on from page_fans_city (because it returns no results), you should find the issue. Most likely, you're using a User Access Token without the scope manage_pages, which prevents it from becoming a Page Access token. You should also include read_insights. Read more here. For further information about the object/insights go here.
Hope this helped.
I want to get all of a user's friend's checkins, and be able to find out that friend's facebook id without having to make an additional request. This is only included in compact and complete user objects, not in mini user objects which are returned with checkins.
Looking through the API docs, it appears that there is no way to request specific fields, or modifications to the results. This seems silly and a bit unlikely since that wastes a ton of resources on both sides of the API, so I'm curious if there is a way to do this that hasn't been initially obvious to me.
Unfortunately cherry-picking fields you want back in a response isn't supported by the API; you'll have to make the additional request.
I have tried raising this concern on Facebook/Support/Bugs but they said I should post implementation issues here. I have read it everywhere and it seems to be quiet open issue till now. I am not sure, If this will be solved or not.
So, what we are doing is, we have clients - Android and iOS.
Apps on Android/iOS allows users to login into the app and generate the token on the basis of permissions set we have, and we are passing this token to server for fetching further data as and when required for client. As our userbase is increasing we are getting Application request limit reached quiet often.
We are fetching photos of users and their friends using FQL. So, when parallely fetching photos for around 8-10 different users, we are reaching the Application request limit sometimes, which is quiet random and we are not aware of the actual scenario when it breaks up and how. According to facebook the limit, which is 1M calls per day, but we are hitting around 80K - 1 Lac API calls in a day, but as users are increasing it is stretching a bit further, Less than or equal to 200 approax calls/user. We tried doing batch calls as well and we hit the application request limit as well.
If anyone of you could help us understand the complete concept of API limit and how this can be handled, then we will really appreciate the help. We want to understand how API limit is decided and it's rate is calculated over which interval so that we will be able to configure on our side accordingly.
Earlier in the day, we ran into a unique API call issue. Our server started to break for API calls for user tokens that are with us, we (on our systems, other than server) tried fetching the data for those tokens (Simple calls - /me or /me/home), and it was working alright for us but not for server, then we tried setting up another server and redirected the requests to our new server then this server works well for the same set of users. Not sure, what went wrong in this case and how it breaks up. Please help.
Many Thanks,
Reno Jones
Did you look at the Insights -> Developer section of developer.facebook.com for your app?
This will show you a breakdown per api call, including warnings and ones that are currently being throttled and why.
Also, are you sure you're using User token authorization and not just your App token?
Beyond that, we take the information from Insights to find api calls to cache on our side rather than hitting Facebook every time. You will likely have to do something similar if you're not already. They have limits for calling too often, as well as for requesting too much data. For those, we had to reduce the limits of historical data we requested.
Let me explain the whole thing here so you can have a clear picture of the situation:
I have a page on facebook and the insights (both on the page and from the graph api) give me a lot of valuable information, but I need to go deeper. I was thinking of applying the social network analysis concepts (centrality, betweenness, eigenvector, etc) on who likes/shares/comments on my pages posts/pics/etc, so I can find the key-users of my page and how virality spreads among them.
Lets take 'liking a post' as an example. First thing I need is to get a list of everyone who liked that post, which is simple and can be done with a few requests to the graphapi. Now comes the tricky part: I need to know the relationship between all these people who liked the post, but I don't have access to their friendlist. To have access to the friend list I'd have to make the page an app and request that permission, which can't be done at this point. But facebook api allows you to check if two individuals (user1 and user2) are friends with a request like this: user1/friends/user2, and for that I don't need special permissions, just a regular token. Well, so far so good, I just get the users who liked the post and check two-by-two which ones are friends. But here comes the problem:
I can make batch requests to the API, which means I can check 50 pairs of users with one request. And from what I read, facebook allows 600 requests each 600 seconds. Simple math: 30,000 pairs of users each 10 minutes. It's a big number, should be enough. It isn't. Let's assume that the post has 1,000 likes (not being optimistic at all). I'd have to check user1 against the other 999 users. Now user2 would have to be checked against the remaining 998 users (no need to check against user1 again, because the friend-check works both ways). User3 against 997 users and so on, until user999 needs to be checked against 1 user. Therefore I'd need to perform 999+998+997+996+...+3+2+1 checks, or 499,500 requests, which means almost 3 hours to get the data obeying facebook limitations. 10k likes would take over a week!
So my question is: is there any other way to make this work? Another way of getting data, or a largest batch request? Some way I can retrieve this data? Or it's just impossible, since facebook retains the important information?
Thank you for reading all this and helping me out ;)
What you are trying to get to is information that Facebook does not want easily available.
In the same way that you don't have access to "friends of friends", trying to reconstruct social connections takes far too many calls to the API since, as you stated, you would need to test against individual pairs.
Whilst your question is valid and from what I can tell you are not trying to obtain this data to to perform some malicious actions, I'm afraid that at this point you'll just have to use the data that Facebook makes available to you through the Insights application and the access to that data though the API as well.