Facebook Graph API: Getting the total number of posts - facebook

I've been using the Facebook Graph API to display user posts. When I get the initial "page" of posts, the resulting data object has a paging property object with a previous and next URL property. I was hoping to generate navigation links based on this available paging information. However, sometimes these URLs point to an empty set of data, so I obviously don't want to navigate the user to an empty page.
Is there a way to find the total count of objects in a collection so that better navigation can be derived? Is there any way to get smarter paging data?
Update:
Sorry if my post isn't clear. To illustrate, look at the data at https://graph.facebook.com/7901103/posts and its paging property URLs. Then follow those URLs to see the issue: empty pages of data.

Since it pages the datas with date-time base. You can't get the knowledge of whether if there are datas or not before you actually send the request to it. But you can preload the data from previous url to determine is it suitable to dispaly a previous link in your web page.

Why be dependent of Facebook?
Why don't you preload all data for a user and save into a database. Then you fetch the posts from db and show to user. This way you have all the control on how many posts there are and how to manage next and prev.

I was going to try to post this as a comment to your question, but I can't seem to do so...
I know that the Graph API returns JSON, and while I've never come across a way to have the total number of posts returned, depending on what technology you are using to process the response, you might be able to capture the size of the JSON array containing the posts.
For example, if I were using a java application I could use the libraries available at json.org (or Google GSON, or XStream with the JSON driver) to populate an object and then simply use the JSONArray.length() method to check for the number of posts returned.
see:
http://www.json.org/javadoc/org/json/JSONArray.html
It might seem like a bit of a simplistic solution, but might be the type of work around you require if you can't find a way to have Facebook return that data.
Can you specify what technology your application is based in?

Related

How to find posts of a facebook page within a certain period of time?

I want to import posts of a page between 07-12-2017 and 10-12-2017.
I have converted the dates to unix timestamps.
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.11/ekantipur?fields=posts.until(1512926148).limit(125)&access_token=MyAccessToken
works and so does
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.11/ekantipur?fields=posts.since(1512666948).limit(125)&access_token=MyAccessToken
But since and until together does not work. It only shows a single id.
Is there an another way to accomplish this task? If yes please reply. Thankyou in advance.
Update here is my updated Url with since and until. Its still not working.
123456/posts?since=07-12-2017&until=10-12-2017
Can you update the original post with your combined Since and Until?
I'm assuming that the SINCE is set to 7/17 and the UNTIL is 10/17, correct? It looks that way from the converted numbers, but I try not to assume it isn't something small like that :). No offense intended.
Looking at the graph API, I am using the page id of one I am the admin of and using since and until and it's coming back with posts between 07-12-2017 and 10-12-2017. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the limit in your urls. What if the limit statements are narrowing things down too much?
I'm just putting this into the graph API and getting the results I'm expecting: (no, my page id isn't 123456)
Granted, I'm not calling it in a url, Graph API is pretty forgiving.

Get share/like count for different url/bogposts/articles

I am looking for a method to get share/like count for each of the blogposts/articles which I create on my website. Interested in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter but Facebook is the most important right now.
Lets take this website as an example: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/
I have found a method to find this out for each url, but that will make it a lot harder for me as I would need to do it manually for each URL.
This is the query I used to get data for a specific URL:
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.7/?id=https://googleblog.blogspot.no/
Is there any method to get data for each and every url which contains: "company name" or something like this?
Will appriciate all the help I can get here.
No, there is no “wildcard” for Open Graph object URLs.
You can however request data for multiple URLs in one go, using the ?ids=foo,bar syntax – https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/using-graph-api/#multiidlookup
This theoretically works for up to 50 ids in one request (although with the ids being URLs in this case, you might only be able to request less, due to URL length limitations.)

Facebook note shared info

My client need to randomize over everyone that shared a specific note on his facebook page, it's like a raffle, however, i didn't found a way to get any info, even the name in a way that i can randomize over them, is there any way that i can fetch this information?
You can query the note for the comments or likes if you are looking at a specific note. Or you can query the user for all their notes and loop over that.
Depending on what language you are using, randomly choosing from an array of items should be trivial.

How to access links provided on one's timeline?

I would like to have access to the links one shared on their timeline.
Using the API Graph Explorer, I see there is a way to access "links". However, it returns empty data. I believe that this might have been used when posting links in FB was done in a special way, different than posting "usual" status.
Then, I thought, I should probably get all the stream and filter the data for links. But at that point, I'm a little confused:
There are THREE different actions that seem to provide the very same data:
- https://graph.facebook.com/me/feed
- .../me/posts
- .../me/statuses
Are they actually all the same?
In addition, all seem to provide me information that is not up to date, but is true for some point in the near past. Moreover, I would like to know how I can get the relevant data from the beginning of the FB usage, or at least, for a given period of time.
Do an HTTP Get to me/links to get the most recent links the user has shared.
To limit it to a timeframe, you can do me/links?since=YYY&until=ZZZ.
Or you can use the paging object to get the previous and next url to use to get that other page of data.

Facebook Graph API SEO Comments and Profanity Filter

I'm trying to integrate the Facebook comments left on our site in a way in which the content can be crawled by search engines and also for people (although I highly doubt there will be many) who don't have Javascript enabled on their browser.
Currently our Facebook comments are displayed via the use of the Facebook comment social plugin (using the <fb:comments href="MY_URL" num_posts="50" width="665"></fb:comments> tag). This ends up rendering an iFrame (which are mostly ignored by search engine crawlers) so the plan is to render this information and format it with basic HTML. To do this, the comments are pulled using the Graph API - this is then only be displayed to crawlers and people with Javascript disabled.
This all works nicely using the Graph API call (https://graph.facebook.com/comments/?ids=MY_URL), parsing the JSON result and displaying it on the page. The problem is that the <fb:comments> approach filters our results based on a blacklist we have set up on one of our Facebook Apps. The AppId with the relevant blacklist is stored on the page using metadata (<meta property="fb:app_id" content="APP_ID"/>) which the <fb:comments> control obviously must somehow use to filter the comments.
The problem is the Graph API method does not filter any results as I guess no blacklist (or App Id containing a blacklist) is specified. Does anyone know how to specify a Facebook App ID to the API call URL or of another way to not fetch commnents back that violate the terms of the blacklist?
On a side note, I know the debate about filtering content in comments rages on but it is a management decision to implement the blacklist, and one that I have no influence in changing - just incase anyone felt the need to explain the reasons why content filtering is or isn't a good idea!
Any thoughts on a solution?
Unfortunately there's no way to access a filtered list of comments using the API - it might be a reasonably request to have this in the API - you should file a wishlist item in Facebook's bug tracker
Otherwise, the only solution I can think of is to implement your own filter on your side when retrieving and displaying the comments from the API.
According to the Comments plugin documentation the filter on Facebook's side is implemented as a simple substring match, so it should be trivial to implement.
A fairly simple regular expression match should be able to check each comment against a relatively long list quickly.
(Unfortunately, the tradeoff here is that implementing a filter is easy, but you'd also need to write an interface so that whoever's updating the list of disallowed words can maintain the list for both the Facebook plugin, and your own filtering.)
Quote from docs:
The comment is checked via substring matching. This means if you blacklist the
word 'at', if the comment contains the sequence 'a' 't' anywhere it will be
marked with limited visibility; e.g. if the comment contained the words 'bat',
'hat', 'attend', etc it would be caught.
Pretty sure there is no current way of doing this from the graph API, the only thing I can suggest is taking the blacklist and build your own filter