Connecting to FacebookAds

The following are optional connection properties:

• Target: Some Facebook tables can be filtered by a target. For example, to retrieve comments on a video, specify the Id of the video as the target. This property enables you to restrict the results of all queries in the connection to records that match the specified target. You can also specify this restriction per query with the Target column.
• AggregateFormat: The adapter returns some columns as a string aggregate. For example, the available likes data for an entity is returned in aggregate. By default, the adapter returns aggregate columns in JSON. You can also return aggregates in XML.
• Version: Set this property to the FacebookAds API version if you need to work with a different version than the default.
• RetryLevel: Use this property to control automatic query retry for specific ad insights queries and errors.

Authenticating to FacebookAds

FacebookAds uses the OAuth standard to authenticate users.

OAuth

In all OAuth flows, you must set AuthScheme to OAuth. The sections below assume that you have done so.

Web Applications

When connecting via a Web application, you need to create and register a custom OAuth application with FacebookAds. See Creating a Custom OAuth App for more information about custom applications. You can then use the adapter to get and manage the OAuth token values. Get an OAuth Access Token

Set the following connection properties to obtain the OAuthAccessToken:

• AuthScheme: Set this to AzureAD.
• OAuthClientId: Set this to the client Id in your application settings.
• OAuthClientSecret: Set this to the client secret in your application settings
• Scope (optional): Set this if you need to customizie the permissions that the driver requests.
• AuthenticateAsPage (optional): Set this to a page name or Id to make requests as a page. The page must be managed by the authenticated user.

Then call stored procedures to complete the OAuth exchange:

1. Call the GetOAuthAuthorizationURL stored procedure. Set the AuthMode input to WEB and set the CallbackURL input to the Redirect URI you specified in your app settings. If necessary, set the "Permissions" parameter to request custom permissions.
2. Open the URL, log in, and authorize the application. You are redirected back to the callback URL.
3. Call the GetOAuthAccessToken stored procedure. Set the AuthMode input to WEB. Set the Verifier input to the "code" parameter in the query string of the callback URL. If necessary, set the "Permissions" parameter to request custom permissions.

To connect to data, set the OAuthAccessToken connection property to the access token returned by the stored procedure. When the access token expires after ExpiresIn seconds, call GetOAuthAccessToken again to obtain a new access token.

Requesting Additional Permissions

You may find while using the adapter that Facebook returns an error stating your app does not have permissions to do a certain action. To resolve this, you must generate a new OAuth access token with the required permissions. Set the Scope property in the authentication step. You can find a list of available Facebook permissions here:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions/

AuthenticateAsPage Property

Use the AuthenticateAsPage connection property if you want to post as a single page. To query collections of pages, leave AuthenticateAsPage blank, in which case CData tools automatically detect which page tokens to use.

The following sections compare the two options.

Posting as a Page

After authenticating to FacebookAds with your user account, you can post, etc. as one of the pages you manage: Set the AuthenticateAsPage property to the Id of the page you want. You can find the Ids for all pages your account has access to by querying the Pages view.

Automatic Page

FacebookAds has made a number of recent changes that require page tokens for most resources owned by a page. This can be troublesome if you manage multiple pages and want to execute the same queries across all pages (such as retrieving Insights). In order to make this work seamlessly with our tools, we have added a way to automatically detect the page token to use. For this to work, simply do not specify the AuthenticateAsPage. Note that the correct page token can only be resolved if the page id is specified as part of the target in the request. This means for some requests you will still need to manually specify AuthenticateAsPage.