Facebook API: Determine if Facebook Page is published / unpublished

Question

What is a reliable way to check whether a Facebook Page is published or unpublished using the graph API? I currently do this:

http://graph.facebook.com/{page_id}

and check if the return value is "false". If it's false, I conclude that it's unpublished and if it returns a graph object, then conclude that it's published. But I'm noticing now that a lot of published pages return "false" from the above request.

Here's an example:

this page is published: http://www.facebook.com/AjiRestaurant

but these requests return false: http://graph.facebook.com/104433516257517 (using page Id) http://graph.facebook.com/AjiRestaurant (using page username)

What is the best way to check whether a Page is published?

Answer 1

Punch this in under FQL query on http://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer

SELECT page_id, name, username, is_published
   FROM page 
   WHERE page_id IN 
      (SELECT page_id FROM page_admin WHERE uid = me()) 
   AND is_published=""
   ORDER BY fan_count DESC

That will select all pages in your account and check if they are published, returning all unpublished pages in a list.

Answer 2

It turns out that there's no known way to check specifically whether a Page is published / unpublished. The graph API http://graph.facebook.com/{page_id} will return false if any of the following is true:

• Page is unpublished
• Page has country restrictions
• Page has age restrictions

If and only if none of the above settings apply, then http://graph.facebook.com/{page_id} will return an object graph.

Note: I'm assuming that an access token with manage_pages permission is not used for the API calls above. With a proper access token, https://graph.facebook.com/{page_id} will return the object graph, regardless of whether the Page has restrictions or not.