There have recently been several questions posted on Facebook.SO using CONTAINS() in the WHERE clause. It seems to work like the Graph API search function, AND functions as an indexed field. All great things for the FQL developer.
SELECT name,
username,
type
FROM profile
WHERE CONTAINS("Facebook")
However, the only official mention of the CONTAINS function appears in the unified_thread documentation. It is mentioned in passing, as a way to search for text contained in a message. It also appeared in this fbrell code sample.
But Contains doesn't seem to be a straightforward search. For example, this query:
SELECT name
FROM user
WHERE CONTAINS("Joe Biden")
returns "Joe Biden" and also "Joseph Biden" and "Biden Joe". But it also returns "Joe Scardino", "Lindsay Noyan" and "Mehmad Moha" among others. What relationship do these people have with the VP of the USA? They aren't my friends, so I'll never know.
There also appears to be the ability to pass CONTAINS a field to search on, however changing the end of my first query to `CONTAINS("Facebook", name) returns an OAuth error:
(#615) 'name' is not a valid search field for the profile table.
In my not-so rigorous testing, I have yet to find a field/table combination that does not return this error.
So what is this mystery function? How does it work? Can it allow us to do things to date impossible in FQL like traversing arrays and filtering data stored in strings?
An answer here would be great, but a description on an FQL functions & methods reference page on the official developer documentation site would be better still.
I don't think that a have any great answers here, but I can give a workaround for the issue of returning unrelated names- which I suspect is because people have made public posts about Joe Biden, liked him, or so on. If you do the following:
SELECT name
FROM user
WHERE CONTAINS("Joe Biden")
AND strpos(lower(name),lower("Joe Biden")) >=0
You will get a resultset that only contains the right names- though it removes the advantage of also returning Joseph Biden, etc. etc.
My personal point of pain is that CONTAINS() appears to work with partial strings (e.g. "Joe Bide") on the profile table, but not on the user table. Very frustrating.
Related
I am using Sphinx (with Thinking Sphinx v2.0 for RoR plugin),
Lets say I have several indexes on User model, lets say on 'name', 'address' and its one-to-many associations like 'posts' , 'comments' etc.
This means searching by post content would return me the User who made the post, and using :fieldmask 'rank mode' of sphinx, I am able to determine that the user was searched due to matching of 'posts'. But user has 'many' posts. So how to determine which 'post' it matched.
Is there any way, while indexing I can specify the index dynamically.?
For e.g. If I can specify index 'post_1'='< post1content >' , 'post_5'='< post5content >' as different 'fields' for user1; similarly 'post_2', 'post_7' for user2, Thus after searching It would return me user2 matched with matching fields as post_7...
Sphinx can't have different fields for each record, I'm afraid, so what you're hoping to do isn't possible with that approach.
If you need to know which posts match a query, I'd recommend conducting the search on the Post model instead, and then you can refer to a post's user? You could sort by user_id before weight, or group by user_id (so only one post per user is returned)? You'd be able to bring in user data into the Post index definition (and if a post has one user, then that data is kept to single values, instead of many, per record).
Hope this gives you some clarity with your options.
If you know, you want to search for post_5 in one query, and for post_7 in another query, you may use json as {post_1:, post_2:}.
Problem is that you have to know number of post you are searching for.
Maybe look to: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24505347/1444576 -if it is similar to your example.
Can't seem to find it in the docs or here. Starting to think this list does not exist.
I'm looking for a complete list of (or a way of generating such a list) possible values that can be returned in the 'relationship' field of Facebook Graph API queries like this:
https://graph.facebook.com/me/family?access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN
(You will of course need to supply your own ACCESS_TOKEN to see the results of such a query. The API explorer is good for that kind of thing - https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/).
As described here -
relationship -- A string describing the type of relationship. Can be one of parent, mother, father, sibling, sister, brother, child, son, daughter.
If you look at the FQL family documentation, the relationship field is listed as a string. These usually are not enumerated anywhere.
I want to do a public search on all facebook users according to the name of the user, but i want the search not to be on the exact name. for exmaple if a user will search for 'John Ada' the result 'John Adam' will be retreived too.
After that the results need to be ordered by mutual_friend_count.
I manged to do this partly with the following FQL :
SELECT uid,name, pic_square, profile_url , mutual_friend_count FROM user WHERE contains("Name Surename")
order by mutual_friend_count desc
but it returns only exact names, and if the name was missing a letter like my earlier example the user was not retreived.
I tried to mess around with the Offset and Limit but with no success either.
Thanks!
The Facebook search algorithms seem to be optimized to find full names. A partial name never seems to return as many results as a full name will. In my experience, Facebook knows how to expand names for common variants. A search for "John Adam" will return "John Adams", "Johnny Adams" and "John Addams"
The other battle you are fighting is the Facebook filtering algorithm. Facebook first finds all matches that meet your query, then filters them for visibility to your user.
You can try adding AND NOT is_blocked to your WHERE statement. This should filter out anything that isn't visible to you before the filtering algorithm.
I'm looking for a way to query contacts in my iPhone app based on a few things. First I only want contacts that have a phonenumber. Second, id like to sort the contacts in order of the number of times contacted.
Android provides attributes that makes this possible and easy to do.
I can't really say that I know the answer, but I believe I know where to find the answer:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/ContactData/Conceptual/AddressBookProgrammingGuideforiPhone/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007744-CH1-SW1
Here are some quotes from that document that seems relevant:
There are two ways to find a person record in the Address Book database: by name, using the function ABAddressBookCopyPeopleWithName, and by record identifier, using the function ABAddressBookGetPersonWithRecordID. To accomplish other kinds of searches, use the function ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople and then filter the results using the NSArray method filteredArrayUsingPredicate:.
To sort an array of people, use the function CFArraySortValues with the function ABPersonComparePeopleByName as the comparator and a context of the type ABPersonSortOrdering. The user’s desired sort order, as returned by ABPersonGetSortOrdering, is generally the preferred context.
Those quotes were both found on this page. I hope it helps.
This is a noob question. According to Facebook API documentation, the sex field in Users.getInfo() function returns values based on users' locale. Hence, determine the gender of user is difficult.
Any solution suggested?
1) This isn't an elegant solution, and perhaps there's a better way that uses the API, but what if you manually created a look-up table for different values of 'sex' in different locales? You could try checking out facebook profiles of people from different countries and get the string displayed for their sex. Then, put that into some kind of dictionary data structure that allows you to grab the M-F string pair based on the locale's code (also given by getInfo()). For example en-US => (male, female), ja-JP => (男性, 女性). Of course, you could try using google translate too. After you gathered this data for a handful of the main locales, you'd be more-or-less covered. Maybe someone on the internets already has done it.
Of course, you could try emailing someone who works on the API for these values. The list of locale codes is here http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Locales .
2) Here is probably a better solution than (1). If you directly query the FQL User table, the value returned in 'sex' will always be English, starting from February 7 2010. More information about that is here: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/User_%28FQL%29 . So, perhaps in the future getInfo() will return only English too. Who knows.
3) The answer to your question is also given on this existing post: Facebook FQL user table `sex` field : how to return male/female even the user is using different locale?