Facebook updates Graph API with features for managing Pages, brings versioning to Ads API

Facebook today updated its Graph API and Ads API to version 2.2. The former is getting new features for apps that manage Pages and the latter is getting versioning support for the first time.

The Graph API update is just an iteration for Facebook, but the Ads API update is part of a bigger story in Facebook’s attempt to support developers better. The company has also updated its Android and iOS SDKs to work with the new APIs.

Here are the feature highlights for Graph API 2.2 (full changelog):

• Apps can now programmatically hide and unhide comments on Page posts (one of the most requested features, Facebook says).
• A new token_for_business field on the User object makes it easier to identify the same person across multiple apps owned by the same business.
• There’s a new way to manage Page subscriptions for real-time updates via a dedicated subscribed_apps edge.
• More of a Page’s attributes are now editable via the API through the Page node or the settings edge.

Apps created today onwards can only call version 2.2 or greater. Version 2.1 will be deprecated two years from today, on October 30, 2016.

Now let’s look at the new Ads API. As of version 2.2, it supports versioning, meaning Ads API methods will be removed from versions 1.0, 2.0, and 2.1 on January 28, 2015, following Facebook’s 90-day breaking change policy the company announced in April. As such, if you’re a developer using the Ads API, you should update your apps to call version 2.2 to avoid errors.

For developers, versioning means increased control over how they opt into new Ads API features. Rather than changing a migration setting in your app dashboard, you can simply specify the version number in your client codebase.

Here are the feature highlights for Ads API 2.2 (full changelog):

• Enforcing targeting and bidding on the ad set level
• Deprecating action spec targeting
• Requiring a new field, promoted_object, on the ad set when the objective is website conversions, page likes, offer claims, mobile app install/engagement or canvas app install/engagement
• Renaming the target_specs field of Reach and Frequency APIs to target_spec to better illustrate what value it accepts; also adding a new field, story_event_type, which will be used to specify when an ad set may or may not have video ads and is required when targeting all mobile devices
• Requiring an app ID when creating a Custom Audience out of FBIDs
• Introducing stability and various improvements to the API by migrating additional endpoints to the Graph API framework

To upgrade to Ads API version 2.2, download Facebook’s latest SDKs for PHP and Python.