Information of re-shared status - facebook-graph-api

Question

I am working with Facebook graph api for few days. I am trying to extract user's status and the information of reshared if any. I can easily find status of a user using fields=id,name,statuses query. But I could not find any information about re-sharing. I found a field of status sharedposts. But could not understand what it actually does. Can anyone enlighten me about how can I collect information about resharing (who reshared,when reshared,resharing location). I used user_status access token.

Answer 1

The sharedposts field applies to a status id. For example, the status id 10151794781777494 is from a status update by the TheKrazyCouponLady which has been shared 4 times. This query:
/10151794781777494?fields=sharedposts
Will return all the information about the users that have shared it. If you want to limit the returned fields to the name and id of the sharer, and the time and location it was shared, you could do this:
/10151794781777494?fields=sharedposts.fields(from,created_time,place)
Although I expect there won't be any location data most of the time.
To find the status id in the first place, you could just query the statuses field for a particular user. Again, using TheKrazyCouponLady (uid 255919387493) as an example:
/255919387493?fields=statuses
To get just the ids:
/255919387493?fields=statuses.fields(id)
As an alternative to that, you may want to consider querying the user's posts instead. The advantage to using posts, is that you can get back the share count for each post in that query.
/255919387493?fields=posts.fields(id,shares)
If the share count on a post is zero, then there is obviously no need to run another query to retrieve the users that have shared that post.
The downside of using posts is that the post id is slightly different from a status id. You'll see ids that look like this:
255919387493_10151794781777494
The first half of that string is the user id of the post owner. The second half is the actual status id. If you want to query the sharedposts field for the post, you first have to extract the second half (the status id) and use that for the query.
Having said that, it occurs to me that you could actually retrieve all the information you need in one go if you chain the statuses query and the sharedposts query together. For example, something like this:
/255919387493?fields=statuses.fields(id,message,sharedposts.fields(from,created_time,place))
That will return the status id and message text for each status from that user, and the user details, create time and location for each person that shared each of those statuses.
Even with paging, though, that is likely to be a fairly slow query, so I'm not sure if that's such a good idea. It's worth considering though.

Answer 2

According new version of API 2.1 and documentation from here
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.1/post
there is a new edge called "sharedposts"
As described here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.1/object/sharedposts
This reference describes the /sharedposts edge that is common to
multiple Graph API nodes. The structure and operations are the same
for each node.
This edge represents any posts where the original object was shared on
Facebook.

Answer 3

If the post type is photo sharedposts will return empty as the object is different to the postID
/317380948302131_847979698575584 => Object : 847979378575616
/317380948302131_847979698575584/sharedposts?fields=from,via
ObjectID will work as expected
/847979378575616//sharedposts?fields=from,via
The only problem if the object is a shared_post it will show all shares from the original post object too and no via node is present .
Just struggle around some time why the APi only sometimes return sharedposts