Is there a way to retrieve all targetable cities in the Ads API?

Question

The autocomplete API allows us to retrieve lists of all countries, regions, and locales by leaving out the query string and setting the result limit to a large number, but this feature isn't available at the city level.

Is there a way that we can retrieve a full list of all targetable cities and their IDs? If not, can we cache the autocomplete data for cities to build up such a list?

Answer 1

That functionality is probably not supported because of the massive amount of return data that would result in fetching all the cities in the world, even with paging. Although limiting the response data by country (by using country_list=["ca"]) and then fetching all cities doesn't sound too far-fetched, however, it is not implemented either.

To me, it sounds like you have two options.

1. Create a bug report using our bug tool to request a wishlist feature (doesn't guarantee anything, but at least we can track it if we choose to implement it and can serve as a way to gauge interest in the feature)
2. IANAL, but according to the FB Platform Policies part 2 of section 2 states

You may cache data you receive through use of the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date. This permission does not give you any rights to such data.

Which sounds like you can cache the autocomplete data since it will better improve the UX of your app, however, just remember that you do not have the rights to the data. I would be cautious about this as it would really suck if you worked really hard to get all the caching functionality built in only to have FB say that it's not allowed. I would advise with some experts some more before pursuing this path.