Question

tl;dr: No, there isn’t a way.

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Calling publish_action using the JS SDK is actually pretty straightforward. However (from the little info I gleaned from reading the documentation), there’s no way for me to query facebook to have it return the action instance ID for an object that I have already published… is there?

Example:

User A loads the page, and the page sends an FB.api call to /me/news.reads, which returns an action instance ID.

User A reloads the page, and the page again sends an FB.api call to /me/news.reads, but this time, the Graph API returns:

{
    error: {
        code: 3501,
        message: 'blahblahblah... already associated... blah blah'
        type: 'OAuthException'
    }
}

Pretty standard stuff, and expected, since I turned off the ability to publish the same URL multiple times.

Now then, is there any way for me to retrieve a previously published action instance ID from the Graph API by passing in the URL, or is it up to me to handle the returned action instance ID (from the original publication attempt) and save it to a database? I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do that…

Answer 1

No, there is no way to retrieve instances of published actions other than:

• Accessing action by id:
  http://graph.facebook.com/ACTION_ID
• Accessing all instances published by specific user:
  http://graph.facebook.com/USER_ID/NAMESPACE:ACTION (NAMESPACE:ACTION may be replaces by the name of one of built-in actions like news.reads, music.listend, etc.

If you want to access details of published actions connected/referencing specific object you’ll need to save that data on your end for later usage.