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I have a Facebook application, which I would like to be able to read facebook group feeds. I have a user-input feed url, that looks like this: http://www.facebook.com/groups/music.sharing/

To access the feed though, I can only use its id, like this: http://graph.facebook.com/[id of group]/feed

I cannot find anything for that in the reference, FQL doesn't allow querying by name so .. I'm stuck. Any ideas ?

Thanks!

user207421
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zrgiu
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3 Answers3

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Its not possible right now, there are multiple open "bugs" and another stating the issue...

All the ways I have tried have failed... e.g. (below would work for pages)

fql?q=select id from profile where username='music.sharing'
Nix
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  • yes, with FQL unfortunately you can only query on groups by their id, not name or anything else. Indeed, a bug (well, more of an issue than a bug) – zrgiu Apr 11 '12 at 00:08
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We are facing this same problem on our current project. It is not an elegant solution that uses the API, but for now we will be using a workaround by scraping the HTML of the group landing page. The group ID number appears four times on this page in the html via links. The most reliable way to search for the ID is to search for "cid=" as it only appears once (right now, anyway) on the page (what follows cid= is the numerical ID). You'll see what I mean when you examine the html of a group page.

If you found a more efficient solution, I'd be grateful if you shared :)

MsPseudolus
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A possible alternative until bug resolution could be: if you are asking your users for permissions then you can ask for the additional permission, user_groups, and then query graph api http://graph.facebook.com/[id of user]/groups. The returned data has group name, id, version, bookmark_order.

bool.dev
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  • while that is the solution I had in mind as a backup, it's not entirely useful because the list of groups returned there doesn't contain the unique name that's in the URLs. – zrgiu Apr 11 '12 at 00:07
  • i thought your users were interacting with the app, if they are they can surely select the correct group. – bool.dev Apr 11 '12 at 04:50
  • yes, but as my app deals with feeds, it requires the user just to paste the url of a wall/timeline/page/group into an input field, and my app automatically makes the distinction and shows feed data (formatted in a special way). – zrgiu Apr 11 '12 at 06:05
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    oh ok. having user paste url is fine, but having them just select from a list, is better don't you think? what are your thoughts? – bool.dev Apr 11 '12 at 06:09
  • the user can use any page, or any user's wall/timeline to create that feed. Can't really create a dropdown with all the pages in FB :-) And, creating a list for just the groups would introduce an extra step for the users, which I would like to avoid. It's all about usability. – zrgiu Apr 11 '12 at 09:35