Add Fields to Crawled Facebook Record XML Data

Developers Gathering & indexing
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1

I’m currently using the social-facebook collection in Funnelback v15.20.21.

The collection config field ‘facebook.post-fields’ does not seem to add additional fields (e.g. ‘full_picture’) to the XML data for each post crawled by Funnelback. I can turn on debugging and see the XML data that is retrieved, and the added fields are not part of it. I also can go into the metadata mappings configuration interface, try to lookup XML entries for the added fields, and they do not exist.

I can remove fields without a problem by not including them in this config setting.

I’m not sure how the XML data is generated from the retrieved Facebook API JSON response. I can see the URL used for the API request, and it includes my added post-field config values. When I manually use the URL, I can see the JSON data coming back for the added fields, but again, they do not show up in the XML data that is generated by Funnelback internally.

What can be done to access these added fields?
We’ve currently moved to using our own custom_gather.groovy script to crawl Facebook, because the Facebook colleciton seems lacking in flexibility.

2

Hi,

Unfortunately the Facebook gatherer used in 15.20 does not support changing the fields.

Additional options have been added to the gatherer since 15.20 and there is an allowance for fields to be specified. I would advise using this when you are able to upgrade and using your custom Facebook gatherer in the mean time.

see: Facebook collections - Funnelback Documentation - Version 15.24.0 and the facebook.*-fields options.

regards,
Peter

3

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Thanks for the reply,

It appears that the description for this patch (15.20.0.6) concerning the Facebook API fields is incorrect then.