The developers of facebook states that page_id in the page table is integer.
But because of many facebook pages, it number increased greater that max int value
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/page/
so the fql's select gives smth like this e+123213
This seems like a bug in page table documentation. In Graph API documentation for page object refer to this field as string.
It's actually better to save/use any id returned by Facebook as string since in many cases value of id will cause overflow over integer boundaries. And for some objects id may contain characters other that numbers (underscore).
Update:
To clarify some things. The issue is really not only with documentation but with return data too. API return response as JSON (or if you using old REST API you can specify XML format too) string. So the response do contain full and correct page_id, but in the phase of JSON parsing you loose it due to fact that it's parsed as integer.
In PHP 5.4 json_decode function have additional options parameter which may be JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING to overcome this issue. You should check if the parsing method you use supports something like this.
There is couple of bugs opened for this issue on Facebook (it's not for the page_id in page table, but same behavior for uid field on other tables):
UID's treated as integers for FQL queries in PHP SDK and exceed PHP_INT_MAX on 32-bit systems
Invalid uid format when fetching FQL page_fan table with fql via GRAPH api
Actually you can do something to overcome this issue:
If you using PHP you may either:
use 64bit version of run-time which have no this issue due to bigger PHP_INT_MAX
use PHP 5.4 with JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING option passed to json_decode
If you using PHP or any other technology:
use alternative JSON parser (I'm not aware of any JSON parser in PHP that able to handle this)
Use quick and dirty reqular expression to wrap all numbers in response with quotes $response = preg_replace('/(\b\d+\b)/', '"$1"', $response) (this is for PHP, but you'll get the idea)
Also I recommend filing additional Bug on Facebook and updating your question so we can subscribe to it as well.
Related
I'm using FQL to get comment data from webpage with a Facebook comment box. I use the graph to get the object_id, then use FQL to get all comments with that object_id. However, if I want to pull data from a specific comment using its id (sometimes referred to as an XID) the FQL returns 0 results.
According to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/comment/ the id should be indexed, so this query should work:
SELECT+id,+text,+time,+fromid,+is_private+FROM+comment+WHERE+id={some known XID}
But it doesn't. BTW, THIS query does work:
SELECT+id,+text,+time,+fromid,+is_private+FROM+comment+WHERE+object_id={some known object_id}
It is irritating how I can't pull query for comments using time or fromid or anything other than object_id, id, post_id, and parent_id... but in practice only using the object_id returns anything.
has anyone else run into this problem? Is my XID query wrong somehow, or is the id only indexed on certain kinds of comments, and not webpage comments for no inexplicable reason?
This one I managed to solve with trial and error. I had to put the id in single quotes. It's odd, I could query the object_id without putting it in quotes, but not the id. This is sort of what the working FQL looked like, except with a valid access token:
SELECT+id,+text,+time,+fromid,+is_private+FROM+comment+WHERE+id='#########_####'
as opposed to:
SELECT+id,+text,+time,+fromid,+is_private+FROM+comment+WHERE+id=#########_####
which failed to return any results.
Thanks for being consistent, Facebook :(
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.
The Facebook FQL user table has a column called is_minor.
The Facebook platform documentation does not indicate that any special Permission is required to access the data in this column. However, all of my attempts to get any data from this column always return NULL. And I've tried everything I can think of...
(I have no problem accessing all sorts of other data from other columns in the FQL user table.)
Does anyone know... is the is_minor column simply not populated at all? Has anyone had any success accessing data from this column?
Well, it turn out this is actually a bug. Facebook has confirmed and assigned it.
http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/217123218363794
(Phew. I'm not crazy.)
In Facebook query language(FQL), you can specify an IN clause, like:
SELECT uid1, uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 IN (1000, 1001, 1002)
Does anyone know what's the maximum number of parameters you can pass into IN?
I think the maximum result set size is 5000
It may seem like an odd number (so perhaps I miss counted, but it's close ~1), but I can not seem to query more than 73 IN items. This is my query:
SELECT object_id, metric, value
FROM insights
WHERE object_id IN ( ~73 PAGE IDS HERE~ )
AND metric='page_fans'
AND end_time=end_time_date('2011-06-04')
AND period=period('lifetime')
This is using the JavaSCript FB.api() call.
Not sure if there is an undocumented limit or it might be an issue of facebook fql server timeout.
You should check if there is a error 500 returned from FB web server which might indicate you are passing a too long GET statement (see Facebook query language - long query)
I realized my get was too long so instead of putting many numbers in the IN statement, i put a sub-query there that fetches those numbers from FB FQL - but unfortunately it looks like FB couldn't handle the query and returned an 'unknown error' in the JSON which really doesn't help us understand the problem.
There shoud not be a maximum number of parameters as there isnt in SQL IN as far as I know.
http://www.sql-tutorial.net/SQL-IN.asp
just dont use more parameters than you have values for the function to check because you will not get any results (dont know if it will give away an error as I never tried to).
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?