With the CData Cmdlets users can install a data module, set the connection properties, and start scripting. This section provides examples of using our FacebookAds Cmdlets with native PowerShell cmdlets, like the CSV import and export cmdlets.

Installing and Connecting

If you have PSGet, installing the cmdlets can be accomplished from the PowerShell Gallery with the following command. You can also obtain a setup from the CData site.

Install-Module FacebookAdsCmdlets

The following line is then added to your profile, loading the cmdlets on the next session:

Import-Module FacebookAdsCmdlets;

You can then use the Connect-FacebookAds cmdlet to create a connection object that can be passed to other cmdlets:

$conn = Connect-FacebookAds

Connecting to Facebook Ads

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 cmdlet returns some columns as a string aggregate. For example, the available likes data for an entity is returned in aggregate. By default, the cmdlet returns aggregate columns in JSON. You can also return aggregates in XML.
• Version: Set this property to the Facebook Ads 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 Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads 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.

Desktop Applications

CData provides an embedded OAuth application that simplifies OAuth desktop Authentication. Alternatively, you can create a custom OAuth application. See Creating a Custom AzureAD App for information about creating custom applications and reasons for doing so.

For authentication, the only difference between the two methods is that you must set two additional connection properties when using custom OAuth applications. After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:

• OAuthClientId: (custom applications only) Set this to the client Id in your application settings.
• OAuthClientSecret: (custom applications only) Set this to the client secret in your application settings.
• CallbackURL: Set this to the Redirect URL 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.

When you connect the cmdlet opens the OAuth endpoint in your default browser. Log in and grant permissions to the application.

Web Applications

When connecting via a Web application, you need to create and register a custom OAuth application with Facebook Ads. See Creating a Custom OAuth App for more information about custom applications. You can then use the cmdlet 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 cmdlet 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 for a desktop application. 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 Facebook Ads 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

Facebook Ads 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.

Retrieving Data

The Select-FacebookAds cmdlet provides a native PowerShell interface for retrieving data:

$results = Select-FacebookAds -Connection $conn -Table "AdAccounts" -Columns @("AccountId, Name") -Where "Name='Act Name'"

The Invoke-FacebookAds cmdlet provides an SQL interface. This cmdlet can be used to execute an SQL query via the Query parameter.

Piping Cmdlet Output

The cmdlets return row objects to the pipeline one row at a time. The following line exports results to a CSV file:

Select-FacebookAds -Connection $conn -Table AdAccounts -Where "Name = 'Act Name'" | Select -Property * -ExcludeProperty Connection,Table,Columns | Export-Csv -Path c:\myAdAccountsData.csv -NoTypeInformation

You will notice that we piped the results from Select-FacebookAds into a Select-Object cmdlet and excluded some properties before piping them into an Export-CSV cmdlet. We do this because the CData Cmdlets append Connection, Table, and Columns information onto each row object in the result set, and we do not necessarily want that information in our CSV file.

However, this makes it easy to pipe the output of one cmdlet to another. The following is an example of converting a result set to JSON:

 
PS C:\> $conn  = Connect-FacebookAds
PS C:\> $row = Select-FacebookAds -Connection $conn -Table "AdAccounts" -Columns (AccountId, Name) -Where "Name = 'Act Name'" | select -first 1
PS C:\> $row | ConvertTo-Json
{
  "Connection":  {

  },
  "Table":  "AdAccounts",
  "Columns":  [

  ],
  "AccountId":  "MyAccountId",
  "Name":  "MyName"
}