Facebook Graph API search using since updated_time parameter

Question

I am using the Facebook Graph API in Python. Every post has two datetimes:

1. created_date
2. updated_date

When I a

Answer 1

As @CBroe points out, this isn't supported by the Facebook Graph API. (It can be done using FQL, but that's deprecated and won't be supported for much longer).

That said, with some creativity (and a bit extra code) a similar effect can be achieved by combining a couple of queries.

In my application, I perform a query with the following parameters:

• until=2015-07-07 (or whatever the since date would have been)
• fields=updated_time (to keep the query fast and the payload small)
• limit=5000 (or some similarly large page size, as I'm only grabbing one field)

I then evaluate each post that has an updated_time greater than the would-be since date, and throw those posts into a queue to download the entirety of the post content.

Note: If you're dealing with content where there are frequent updates on past content, you'd likely want to use the Graph API's Batch Requests feature, as opposed to downloading each post individually.

So, for example, if the until (and, thus, since) date is 2015-07-07 and the updated_time on a post is 2015-10-15, then I know that post was created prior to 2015-07-07 but updated afterwards. It won't get picked up in a since query, but I can easily download it individually to synchronize my cache.

Answer 2

If the aim of your application is to react to changes on a given page or feed, consider using Webhooks instead of manually crawling the page for updates.

Webhooks allows you to receive real-time HTTP notifications of changes to specific objects in the Facebook Social Graph.