Adapting Page Post Queries from Facebook API 2.5 -> 2.7

Question

I'm currently grabbing post-level insights from my FB page 2.5 for a dashboard to see how well recent posts are doing; a simple benchmark/performance manager dashboard that does all the querying on the front-end [js api].

The calls/procedure I used to use:

1) Get my posts

[page_id]/posts

2) Then loop them and pull the post data from two synchronous calls

// A) gets all the metrics
[page_post_id]/insights

// B) gets other data critical for front-end display
[page_post_id]/?fields=type,created_time,permalink_url

This works perfectly, and for as far as FB says, it will work until June 2018 (I think).

My problem is that the call for step 2-A fails because I believe it requires a separate call for each metric.

That 2-A call returns:

{
  "error": {
    "message": "Invalid query",
    "type": "OAuthException",
    "code": 3001,
    "error_subcode": 1504028,
    "is_transient": false,
    "error_user_title": "No Metric Specified",
    "error_user_msg": "No metric was specified to be fetched. Please specify one or more metrics to be fetched and try again.",
    "fbtrace_id": "XXXXXXXXX"
  }
}

Am I wrong?

Is there something that could be done better or would I need to call each metric independently?

I'll eventually need to get there in 2 years but better to address it early and get my teeth on that fresh, new data.

Thanks in advance everyone!

Cheers!

Answer 1

I used a similar setup in Python and ran into the same issue.I've discovered that the {metric} parameter can actually be an array of values.

In Facebook's Graph Explorer I managed to get multiple metrics in one call using this syntax:

<post_id>/insights/["post_stories","post_storytellers"]

You can add additional metrics to the array as needed.

As far as I can tell this feature is not (properly) documented in the Graph API documentation pages, so I'm not sure this usage is intended or not.