Why do I get less metadata when using Facebook Graph API with long-lived page-token?

Question

I am trying to store posts from FB pages in an Elasticsearch cluster. I am using the Logstash plugin 'http_poller' to retrieve data from Facebook's graph API. During testing, I used a user access token in the query string that kept expiring. I extended the access token for my application, but the data I get back looks quite different. It seems like the user access token returns individual posts with metadata (like, the page name which is what I need); whereas using the page token returns a giant chunk of statuses that don't include as much metadata.

I've been googling for hours and hours on what changes to make to my query string which right now looks like this:

https://graph.facebook.com/[id-of-company-FB-page]/feed?access_token=[my-long-lived-page-access-token]

Any help appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

Instead of googling, just have a look at the docs, and it's all there:

• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/using-graph-api#reading (see "Choosing fields")
• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.5/post/

So, a request could be

GET https://graph.facebook.com/[id-of-company-FB-page]/feed?fields=id,message,created_time,link,picture,place&access_token=[my-long-lived-page-access-token]

See an example in the Graph API Explorer