Question

Since notifications are not available in the Facebook Graph API, I am using FQL to retrieve them, as detailed at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/notification/.

What I would like to do is use the information returned to fetch the “source object”. So if the notification is “Bob commented on your status”, I want to find that status object – and if Bob comments on my Note, or posts to the Wall for my Event, etc.

notification_id, sender_id and recipient_id alone don’t seem to be enough information to achieve this. The href field is tantalisingly close – it’ll return a link that a user can click on to be taken to the appropriate page, but that doesn’t look like much help to me as the URL format varies wildly between “source object” types. I can’t find a reliable way to turn href into a parameter I can pass to the Graph API.

So, if what I want to do is possible, what’s the best way to do it?

My thoughts:

1. Is there a way to give the “user-friendly” href to an API and have it return the appropriate Graph API results (or have it return the appropriate Graph API URL)?

2. Is there another way the information returned by an FQL ‘notification’ query can be used or combined to make a proper Graph API URL?

3. Is there another way of retrieving notifications that will give me what I want?

I’m using PHP and Facebook’s PHP SDK, though this doesn’t look like a PHP-specific issue.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You can get object_id, object_type from the notification table and use that to fetch the original post. Sorry, this wasn’t documented in the ‘notification’ table, but is documented now.

E.g.:
select object_id, object_type from notification where recipient_id=<user_uid>

which returns something like:

[
  {
    "object_id": "<object_id_1>",
    "object_type": "group"
  },
  {
    "object_id": "<object_id_2",
    "object_type": "stream"
  },
]

and you can then use the object_id to fetch the post:

https://graph.facebook.com/<object_id_1>?access_token=<access_token>