Shall PageOperations Interface Have A Method For Retrieving Pages Only?

[vw729]

In our app, we need to let users make a post on their facebook pages (pages they have the admin right). To do so, we first need to retrieve all their page entries. With the current API, the getAccounts method needs to be used for this purpose. The method, however, returns more than just page entries. Although it is easy to filter out returned "account" with the application category, I wonder whether another method is needed for pages only or not while I haven't found a reason to get application category entries.

[habuma]

The getAccounts() method simply calls Facebook's {User}/accounts endpoint, which returns a list of all pages, including pages for applications. I suppose that there could be a separate method that does that filtering for you, but from what I can tell there's no way to ask Facebook to do the filtering. (All attempts have resulting in an error from FB saying "The page_admin table does not support search.").

But if that's a feature that's important to you, then please feel free to submit an issue at https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SOCIALFB and I'll consider it.

[vw729]

Hi Craig, thanks for your reply. I tested the method against an account with four pages. Those pages were set up as pages, but not applications at all. The method return seven entries. Other than those four pages, three entries are in the application category with the page names. I don't know what is the definition of an application in FB.

[habuma]

An application is just what it sounds like. It's an application that the given user has administrative rights to. For example, I have *SEVERAL* applications listed if I call getAccounts() for my user, including things like Spring Social Showcase, Greenhouse, and many many more.

So, when you ask for a list of a user's "accounts" you get everything that the given user has administrative rights to. In Facebook terms, that includes both pages and applications. Does this user you're testing with not have administrative rights to any applications?

Perhaps what's causing some confusion here is that the getAccounts() method is on the PageOperations interface and you'd expect to only get pages back and not applications. But at least historically, applications have also had pages associated with them, so it still made sense to return applications along with other pages. The pages just had a type of "application" (as opposed to something like "Product/service" or some other page type).