Does an open graph object have to correspond to a user visible page?

Question

I have defined "book" to be an open graph object in my Facebook app. A book is a logical unit, and the user can view a book in a number of different ways in the app. However, there is no single URL in my app which corresponds to any single book.

I thought I would be able to have a URL which spits out open graph meta data to Facebook behind the scenes. For example http://www.example.com/opengrpah/object_book.php?id=3265 would return the title, author, and other info for a book, but not actually be user visible.

However it appears that Facebook uses the object URL for actions involving the object. If I create an action related to the book (e.g. add a book), then if somebody clicks on the link in the ticker they will go to the object_book.php URL, instead of an actual app page. Thus they will see the meta data but nothing useful.

Is this by design? Certainly an object shouldn't have to correspond to a single user-visible page. Can we not have object data drawn from one URL, but have that object displayed to the user within the context of an app?

Answer 1

How about just redirecting from your Open Graph Object URL to the actual app page? Or how about designing your app pages to provide Open Graph metadata?

I think this could be a tricky solution.