In Facebook Graph API - Is LIMIT parameter realy functional? - facebook

I'm trying to collect all the posts of my company page with this kind of query
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.2//feed?limit=250&fields=id,type,status_type,comments{id},likes{id},shares
Problem is that I'm not collecting all posts.
I will have a better result with limit=20 and some time with limit=100
Most of the pages (from the pagination mechanism point of view) will not have 100 items.
I know some posts may not be exposed because of privacy settings.
My issue is that a call with limit=20 is not returning once going through pagination the same amount of data as limit=250.
How could it be?
How providers of Facebook Analytics can garanty the quality of data they collect ?

The Facebook graph api only allow the max of 100 items per request, despite you specify more than that.

Afaik the limit parameter is indeed buggy. But 250 would be a very high value, there is a max value for the parameter too - i assume it depends on the API call how high it is, could be fixed too.
Better donĀ“t use limit at all and use paging to get more results: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/using-graph-api/v2.2#paging

Related

How can I query multiple object insights in one Facebook API Call?

I saw this question (Query multiple insights metrics in one API call) but their answers are from 2012 and no longer work.
I want to get post_video_avg_time_watched and post_video_views in a single api call to Facebook.
How is this possible?
I don't want to use Facebook's batch request, because it counts against my rate limits twice instead of once.
Yes, and easily! Just add the second value after a comma and the first value like so: /insights/post_video_views,post_video_avg_time_watched/lifetime

Facebook graph API response size limiting (error code 1)

Just sharing some information I came across while testing my application.
Facebook Graph API implements rate limiting as described on their documentation page. Today I was trying to retrieve the feed from CNN facebook page and I got the following 500 error:
{"error":{"code":1,"message":"Please reduce the amount of data you're asking for, then retry your request"}}
This is the query I was trying to test:
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.3/5550296508/feed?fields=id,actions,application,caption,created_time,description,from,icon,is_hidden,link,message,message_tags,name,object_id,picture,place,privacy,properties,source,status_type,story,story_tags,to,type,updated_time,with_tags,shares,likes.limit(50),comments.filter(stream).limit(50){attachment,created_time,from,id,like_count,message,message_tags,comments{attachment,created_time,from,id,like_count,message,message_tags}}&access_token=xxxxxxx
I tried to set different limit values to reduce the size, and eventually it worked. By inspecting the response size and playing around with it a bit, I found that the error is thrown when the response reaches (roughly) the 200k threshold.
I tested with Graph API versions 2.3 - 2.4 - 2.5 - 2.6
I found no documentation about this response size limit on the facebook APIs documentation, so it's possible that it will be changed in the future.
Just thought it might be useful to share if you are modelling something using their API.
I originally misready the error message Please reduce the amount of data you're asking for, then retry your request and assumed I was getting rate-limited -- i.e. making too many API calls in a short time period. Thanks Dieghito for your answer, which helped me realize the error is about the response size.
In my case it was fetching /comments that was exceeding the response size limit. I had the limit set to 1000, which was fine for most posts. But for posts with a lot of lengthy comments, the response size grew too large. I had paging already setup, so simply requesting fewer comments per page (limit: 50 or 100) solved the problem for me. Just posting that here for people whose problem could be related to comments.

How to get Facebook page total likes number with the new Graph API (v2.4)

So recently there was a update to the Facebook Graph API and now pretty much everything requires a access_token to retrieve any type of data.
Previously you could get the number of page likes by accessing the graph like so:
http://graph.facebook.com/{page-name}
But now if you try it says you need to have a access token because of a recent update to the API. Now the issue i am having is i cant access the likes even with an access token this is the response i am getting:
Request
http://graph.facebook.com/{page-name}/?access_token={access_token}
Response
array(2) {
["name"] "Page Name"
["id"] "Page Id"
}
Now at first i thought the access token wasn't being generated with the correct scopes but i am 99% sure you only need read_stream to pull that type of data.
Second thought is that they have removed the ability to acces likes of any page and you need a page token to receive that type of data or finally i am missing something incredibly small here and its still achievable?
So my question is can you still get the number of likes of any page using the Facebook Graph API and if the answer is yes how do you do it?
any help appreciated
This can help you! Just add ?fields=likes after the page name/id. You can use any access token for fetching data!
graph.facebook.com/{page_name}?fields=likes&access_token={token}
The Graph API v2.4 reduces the number of fields in default responses.
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2015/07/08/graph-api-v2.4/
Fewer default fields for faster performance: To help improve performance on mobile network connections, we've reduced the number of fields that the API returns by default. You should now use the ?fields=field1,field2 syntax to declare all the fields you want the API to return.
If you do ?fields=likes it should show up.
You can do like this:
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.4/{page_id}/fields=likes

Facebook FQL posts limit issue

Currently i am using following FQL query :-
https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=select post_id,likes FROM stream WHERE source_id=XXXXXXXX LIMIT 0,10000&access_token=XXXXXXXXXXXXX&format=json
I have two Facebook Accounts / pages & able to download data using above API. Able to retrieve posts & post likes count.
But, from last three days, for one Facebook account above FQL query is not working. it is returning message :- "error": "Request failed" . For other account it is working fine.
For each facebook Account / pages i have generated separate Access Tokens.
But, if i update limit from : -
Limit 0,50
Limit 50,100
then it is working & returning posts from page but not returning all post which i have previously getting from Limit 0,10000
Please help me, if any one have idea about this issue ?
Thanks
Facebook will cancel queries which take too long or too many resources to execute. In general, I would never use LIMITs which are that high. There's a high probability that they will fail, and you can't really incfuence the query execution "load" other than setting the LIMIT to a reasonable number (which means implementing a paging mechanism).

Having trouble with Facebook FQL - Empty Return

I'm attempting to make a Facebook app that will query insights metrics from pages that I administer. I'm unsure if there is a better approach, but I am running into issue after issue trying to build my queries.
For instance, many of the "metric" fields listed here return empty data objects. Testing the following FQL query on the Graph API Explorer is an example (substitute with your page ID):
fql?q=SELECT metric, value FROM insights WHERE object_id=<USER_ID> AND metric='post_storytellers' AND period=0
I have granted myself "read_insights" permissions.
I'm wondering if this is a common issue, if I'm doing this wrong, and if there is a better way (i.e. FQL is problematic, stick to the Graph API). I started this project using Perl, intending to simply parse the return data into a database. Perhaps I would be better served writing this in PHP?
The post_storytellers metric, has only 3 available periods: day, week and days_28. When you put period=0, you are asking for the lifetime period.
Your query should be something like this:
SELECT metric, value FROM insights WHERE object_id=<PAGE_ID> AND metric='page_storytellers' AND end_time=1334905200 AND period=period('week')
I hope it would help!