I have been using Facebook4j for a Facebook graph API related requirement and my requirement is quite simple.
Requirement : I need search Facebook objects (all public objects- posts/comments/pages/ etc..) for given keywords frequently and persist all results into the db.
Problem : Although the requirement looks straight forward I am stuck in handling pagination of the results and calling the API later without losing any items ( posts/pages/comments ) in the consecutive calls to the API.
Doing some research I have found graph API provide several Pagination methods and Cursor based is the best and recommended. But unfortunately cursor based search is not available for all kind of objects. So I had to choose time-based pagination which uses until and since parameters.
Q1.Is my decision is correct?
Following is a sample previous and next URLs I get when I do a search API call using Facebook4j
previous = https://graph.facebook.com/v1.0/search?limit=200q=infographic&access_token=
[ACCESS_TOKEN]&since=1400152500&__previous=1,
next = https://graph.facebook.com/v1.0/search?limit=200&q=infographic&access_token=
[ACCESS_TOKEN]&until=1399983583
Say I did a API call and using the Facebook4j API method then I should be able to use fetch next method and continue.
facebook.fetchNext()
But when ever I get an exception in my application OR at the point there are no further results I assume that I should be able to persist since/until values and use them for later API calls in the future and continue getting search results from where I stopped last time.
Q2. Is the assumption regarding the pagination correct ?
So I am assuming that my future API calls would be something similar to the below. I am not sure whether to use 'since' or 'until'.
Q3.Is the way I call the API below to continue searching from a previous search is fine ?
ResponseList<JSONObject> results = facebook.search("KEYWORD",new Reading().limit(200).until("1399983583"));
Also I am not sure whether these results are paginated in such a way I get the newest result set when I use the "NEXT url" / fetchnext() provided ?
Q4.Please clarify me on now the NEXT url provided exactly works in terms of pagination and future API calls?
If my above approaches are wrong, please suggest the best practices which I should follow to handle this requirement.
