Search Facebook events and pagination (Graph API)

Question

I am requesting this page to get the events with the keyword

"conference":https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=conference&type=event

This works fine.

The problem is the pagination returned:

"paging": {
    "previous":"https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=conference&type=event&limit=25&since=2010-12-18T17%3A00%3A00%2B0000",
    "next":"https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=conference&type=event&limit=25&until=2010-11-04T16%3A29%3A59%2B0000"
 }

It seems to have more events with "conference", but requesting these 2 pagination URLS returns no data.

It's weird because it's the same for any requested keyword, and the pagination URLs returned by the Facebook API seems to always returns empty data.

Does anyone know what's the issue?

Thanks

Answer 1

I encountered similar confusion with a query against places. The "next" URL behaved exactly as you described it.

I could query location information using a url like this:

https://graph.facebook.com/search?access_token=INSERT_TOKEN&type=place&center=55.8660,-4.2715&distance=150&limit=10

And got back JSON with the first 10 places plus the following fragment which suggests the existence of paging params:

"paging": {
      "next": "https://graph.facebook.com/search?access_token=INSERT_TOKEN&type=place&center=55.8660\u00252C-4.2715&distance=150&limit=10&offset=10"

Hitting that URL doesn't work. But I did figure out a combination of limit and offset params that gave me effective paging.

limit=10 & offset not defined => first 10 results
limit=20 & offset=10 => next 10 results
limit=30 & offset=20 => next 10 results
limit=40 & offset=30 => last 8 results (can stop here because less than 10 back)
limit=50 & offset=40 => confirmation that there are no more results

I realise that I've got "limit" and "offset" rather than the "limit" and "until" params that you get, but, hopefully you could apply the same technique i.e. keep incrementing the limit and inc the date/time to that of your last result?

Answer 2

I think this is a standard practice in Facebook Graph API. I think if your request resulted to a non empty JSON, they will always give you the next paging, even though it might be empty.

I am however not 100% sure, because Facebook Graph API does not seem to be very well documented... (for example they said we can modify this pagination thing but did not explain clearly how to do it).