CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#facebook-graph-apihttp-status-code-403
ohiodoug
ohiodoug

Reputation: 1513

Facebook Graph API 403 Forbidden Error

This is similar to some questions on here, but none have seemed to produce an answer that has helped me. I'm calling the graph api from a c#/.Net application to get photos for a particular album, and I'm receiving a 403 error...sometimes.

I've never received the error in my development environment, only in production. I'm also caching the responses for an hour, so the most the application would hit the API in a given hour would be around 20 times, and not all at once. I'm currently swallowing the exception when it errors out and simply not showing the images, but that isn't a long-term solution.

var request = WebRequest.Create("https://graph.facebook.com/ALBUM_ID/photos");
var stream = request.GetResponse().GetResponseStream();

This just started happening about a month ago but I didn't see anything in the breaking changes list that would suggest this behavior. Any insight would be appreciated.

Update

This was hidden away in the response stream.

{"error":{"message":"(#4) Application request limit reached","type":"OAuthException","code":4}}

I don't see for the life of me how I could be hitting a limit considering I'm only hitting the api a few times.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 11157

Answers (1)

user2571712
user2571712

Reputation: 51

if you make a GET request to one of FB graph API endpoints that does not require access_token that does not mean you should not include it in request parameter. If you do as FB documentation says as do not include access_token then in FB server side it registers into your server machine. So limit (whatever amount is it exactly) can be reached very easily. If you however, put the user access token into the request (&access_token=XXXXXX) then requests register into the specific user, so the limit hardly ever be reached. You can test it with a simple script that makes 1000 requests with and without user access_token.

NOTE, FB app access token will not be sufficient as you will face the same problem: requests will be registered into app access_token that situation is alike making requests without access_token.

Upvotes: 3

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