Question

According to the Facebook Graph API documentation, the fields param acts as a result mask:

By default, most object properties are returned when you make a query.
You can choose the fields (or connections) you want returned with the
“fields” query parameter.

Indeed, this works fine for most fields. For instance, /7354446700?fields=name,picture returns:

{
  "name": "Grooveshark", 
  "id": "7354446700", 
  "type": "page", 
  "picture": "https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/203560_7354446700_6819703_q.jpg"
}

However, for some reason, as soon as the likes field is added to the fields list, things break down. For instance, /7354446700?fields=name,picture,likes returns:

{
  "name": "Grooveshark", 
  "id": "7354446700", 
  "type": "page", 
  "picture": "https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/203560_7354446700_6819703_q.jpg", 
  "likes": {
    "data": [
    ]
  }
}

Even more strange, if I omit the other two fields (name and pictures), sending only likes, I get

{
  "likes": {
    "data": [
    ]
  }
}

The reason I find this extra-strange is because the “mandatory” fields (id and type) which should be added to every response are not included here (although they were included when fields=name,picture,likes).

What appears to be happening is that the field=likes parameter appears to be misinterpreted as a Connections request rather than simply a field mask, hence the data segment that normally appears when you’d call /7354446700/likes.

Is there a good reason for this? Is there any other way to get the likes field without fetching the entire object? I can’t imagine this would be expected behavior, so I assume it is a bug, but I thought I’d ask here first before filing one.

Answer 1

This indeed appears to be a bug; I’ve checked internally and there’s an as yet unresolved task open to fix this issue which was reported to us in our bug tracker previously.

In the meantime, the default return value for a page will include the ‘likes’ field even if it cant be retrieved solely.