Configure a Connection Profile

From the CData ribbon, click Get Data and select From Facebook Ads connection/s to launch the CData Query window. To setup a new connection, you will have to click the New Facebook Ads Connection button. Here you can set the connection settings, test the connection, and save the connection profile.

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 add-in returns some columns as a string aggregate. For example, the available likes data for an entity is returned in aggregate. By default, the add-in returns aggregate columns in JSON. You can also return aggregates in XML.
• 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

Desktop Applications

CData provides an embedded OAuth application that simplifies OAuth desktop Authentication. Alternatively, you can create a custom OAuth application. See Creating an Azure AD Application 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 add-in opens the OAuth endpoint in your default browser. Log in and grant permissions to the application. [

Requesting Additional Permissions

You may find while using the add-in 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/

Note that in some cases, permissions restrictions might not be due to missing but requestable Facebook Ads OAuth permissions, but instead might be due to missing OAuth app features, like Page Public Content Access or Page Public Metadata Access. These features are tied to the OAuth app as a whole, and cannot be approved or denied for individual OAuth access tokens requested by users. Consider Creating a Custom OAuth App if you need access to app features not available with the embedded OAuth app.

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. Alternatively, if you would like to disable this automatic detection and thus require usage of AuthenticateAsPage when querying a page, set AutoDetectPageTokens to "False".

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 and leave AutoDetectPageTokens set to "True". 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.

Setting AutoDetectPageTokens to "False" will disable automatic page token detection.

Connection Properties

The Connection properties describe the various options that can be used to establish a connection.

Managing Connections

After successfully authenticating to Facebook Ads you will be able to customize the data you are importing. To learn more about this, see Managing Connections.

See Also

• Querying Data: Use the data selection wizard to pull data into a spreadsheet. You can also configure scheduled data refresh here.
• Using the Excel Add-In: Find other ways to interact with Facebook Ads data, such as using the available CData Excel Functions.