Facebook Garage - Part 4

August 7th, 2007

FQL: Overview by Craig Saila

Facebook API calls are just embedded FQL calls.

Advanatages:
  • common syntac for all methods
  • condense facebook queries
  • reduce response size
FQL is very similar to SQL. Sub selects are allowed, etc.

Ex: SELECT current_location FROM user WHERE uid = 324324. This will return an XML response.

There are about two dozen tables that can be queried. The users table is most often queried.

FQL contains some helper functions that help with queries. It's quite PHP like.

You can only query against "indexable" columns in your where statement. You need at least one in your query.

FQL is designed to be efficient, so no JOIN, ORDER BY, GROUP BY or LIMIT. Each FROM can only reference one table. You must also specify each field that you want the query to return ("SELECT *" is not allowed). Sorting of data, etc must be done on the application level.

Tips:
  • Use the developers tools (fql.query)
  • Read the API docs
  • Share what you learn on your blog or wiki
Posted by Wesley Filed in

2 Responses to “Facebook Garage - Part 4”

  1. Craig Saila Says:
    August 8th, 2007 at 12:02 PM Great summaries. The slides for this FQL presentation are now online at: http://www.slideshare.net/csaila/fql-overview/
  2. Wesley Says:
    August 8th, 2007 at 06:09 PM Thanks Craig. All of the presentations at the developers garage were fantastic. Can't wait for the next one this fall.

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