Facebook API - news feed with wall posts

Question

I am fetching a user's news feed using the Facebook API and displaying some of the data on a page. However, I am having trouble with wall posts. The data returned by the API considers a wall post to be a "status" update by the user posting, and the data does not include a field to say who the wall post is written to. Is it possible to query an item to check whether it is a wall post or not? Or is there a way I can receive the name of the recipient?

Here is the code I am using to fetch the user's news feed:

FB.api('/me/home', function (response) { console.log(response) });

A wall post will just give me message (content of the wall post) and type of status. For example:

If Oliver wrote on John's wall, saying: "Hi", Facebook gives me:

{
    from: {
        name: "Oliver"
    },
    message: "Hi",
    type: "status"
}

There's nothing to tell me it is a wall post nor who the recipient is. The result does include some other arbitrary data but none of that helps (id, created_time, etc.)

DMCS DMCS · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-05T23:56:16

Facebook has made this topic overly confusing. Just reading their documentation on the user object in the Graph API leaves you guessing: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/

/user/feed The user's wall.

/user/home The user's news feed.

UPDATED: /user/home endpoint is now deprecated [07.06.2020], looks like there is no any possibility to get news feed now, see graph api user news feed

/user/statuses The user's status updates.

Why they couldn't have the "wall" /user/wall and "news feed" /user/newsfeed "status updates" as /user/statusupdates to make is simple I will never know!

So to get a list of status updates, do an HTTP Get to http://graph.facebook.com/me/statuses?access_token=ValidUserAccessToken for the current user.

To get a list of wall stream items, do an HTTP Get to http://graph.facebook.com/me/wall?access_token=ValidUserAccessToken for the current user.

To get a list of home feed stream items, do an HTTP Get to http://graph.facebook.com/me/home?access_token=ValidUserAccessToken for the current user.

When you come across the "from" and you wonder who it's to, it's "to" the user who's access token you're using when calling /me/.... or if your calling with a specific ID /UserId/... then it will be the user id for the "to".

Another thought: Grab the complete object from the stream FQL table object (developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/stream) and see if there's some information there that's not exposed via the Graph object.

Facebook API - news feed with wall posts

1 Answers