Does anyone know how to order Facebook places by distance from a search location? Note that I don't want to order results in my client app. I want the Facebook server to provide me with ordered results to facilitate pagination. I always want to append places from subsequent queries to the end of my array.
This does not seem possible using the graph API query such as:
https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=coffee&type=place¢er=37.76,-122.427&distance=1000&.... because there is no way to tell Facebook to order the results. The nearest place may be last in the list of returned results.
I have been trying to replicate the above query using FQL
but have a problem in that the name & description fields in the Facebook place table are not indexable. FQL such as:
SELECT
page_id, name, display_subtext, description,
distance(latitude, longitude, "37.76", "-122.427"), checkin_count
FROM place
WHERE ((distance(latitude, longitude, "37.76", "-122.427") < 25000)
AND (strpos(lower(name), "coffee") >= 0
OR strpos(lower(description), "coffee") >= 0))
ORDER BY distance(latitude, longitude, "37.76", "-122.427") ASC
LIMIT 20 OFFSET 0
Problem with this is that the fields name
and description
are not indexable in the place table. This means that not all the results are returned by the FQL, there are many missing results.