May 2011
Beginner
408 pages
10h 27m
English
Content preview from Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®
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Selectively Querying Information with Property Selection
In the olden days of Facebook, API developers had to use a query language called Facebook Query Language (FQL) to selectively query results. Selectively querying results from Facebook API allowed developers to reduce the bandwidth that was necessary when making calls to get large data sets. This way, Facebook was only returning the information that developers absolutely needed.
To this day, FQL is still available and is not rumored to be going away anytime soon. (I cover FQL in the section, “Retrieving Advanced Data with FQL.”) However, you can selectively choose what you want returned to get the maximum bang for your buck using plain Graph API. Try this method first; then, if you need to get more specific (for example, joins), use FQL.
Using the IDs parameter to select more than one object
Selection in Graph API supports two ways to selectively choose information. The first is a way to select more than one object in a single request. You do this with the ids parameter appended to your Graph API call with a comma-separated list of the objects you want to have returned:
https://graph.facebook.com?ids=dummiesbook,stay
The URL GET request (that you can just paste into your Web browser for now) returns both Facebook Page objects for dummiesbook and stay in a JSON object that includes an array of two more JSON objects that include information about the two. The following code shows what this query would return:
{ "dummiesbook": ...Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.