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I am tryning to list all messages for a thread in the inbox. I notice that I get the 25 last messages by default by doing something like this:

https://graph.facebook.com/<threadID>/comments?access_token=<token>

I get data for the 25 last messages in the thread, in this case message 4 to 28. The first message has a created_time" of "2011-01-21", the last (newest) has a "created_time" of "2013-09-24". The data returned for the "comments" connection has paging, the "next" and "previous" links are present and looks like this:

"previous"

https://graph.facebook.com/<threadID>/comments?access_token=<token>&limit=25&since=1380049638&__paging_token=<threadID>_28"

"next"

https://graph.facebook.com/<threadID>/comments?access_token=<token>&limit=25&until=1295625728&__paging_token=<threadID>_4

However, both return empty data sets!

How can I get this to work?

Another obeservation: when experimenting with "until", I noticed that when setting "until=2013-02-23" or earlier the response is also an empty data set!

I have also noticed another thing: the default limit seems to be 25 messages, however even when setting limit to a high number (like "limit=100) you only get around 28-30 messages per request. So it seems that for the thread/comments connections there are two problems: 1) "limit=" does not work as expected 2) "until=" does not work as expected: going back before a certain date/time returns an empty data set (this is why the paging does not work I guess).

Any ideas on how to get around this?

user3016620
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1 Answers1

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If you have a problem with next URL for the pagination, try using the offset along with the limit parameters in the URI.

For example, instead of making an API call to <threadID>/comments, make a call to /comments?limit=100&offset=0. This will start the list of the messages from an offset of 0 and will display a list of 100 messages on each page. The next URL will work just fine in this case. You can however increase the limit of the messages per page.

Also, there are some issues with the paging. Have a look at this post to learn how it works actually.

Rahil Arora
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  • Do you want to try this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20106853 I am kind of at a fix whether to connect the fb fan page with fb login app. – Ethan Nov 21 '13 at 09:53
  • Thanks Rahil Arora! Using the offset parameter kind of works! As an example: I have a thread with 60 messages. The initial request with offset=0 returns messages 36 to 60 (the default limit is 25). The next request with offset=25 returns messages 11 to 35 and finally using an offset of 50 returns messages 1 to 10! However, I still think that paging for thread comments is broken (paging seems to work as advertised in all the other connections I have tried). Seems to be related both to the "until" and the "limit" parameters. Makes it difficult to make a generic pager. – user3016620 Nov 21 '13 at 14:11
  • I think you are right. I tried my method on paging of users retrieved from the friend list and it was working fine. There might be some bugs in the paging for thread comments. – Rahil Arora Nov 21 '13 at 16:37