Facebook Graph API: Getting the total number of posts

I've been using the Facebook Graph API to display user posts. When I get the initial "page" of posts, the resulting data object has a paging property object with a previous and next URL property. I was hoping to generate navigation links based on this available paging information. However, sometimes these URLs point to an empty set of data, so I obviously don't want to navigate the user to an empty page.

Is there a way to find the total count of objects in a collection so that better navigation can be derived? Is there any way to get smarter paging data?

Update: Sorry if my post isn't clear. To illustrate, look at the data at https://graph.facebook.com/7901103/posts and its paging property URLs. Then fol开发者_C百科low those URLs to see the issue: empty pages of data.

Since it pages the datas with date-time base. You can't get the knowledge of whether if there are datas or not before you actually send the request to it. But you can preload the data from previous url to determine is it suitable to dispaly a previous link in your web page.

Why be dependent of Facebook?
Why don't you preload all data for a user and save into a database. Then you fetch the posts from db and show to user. This way you have all the control on how many posts there are and how to manage next and prev.

I was going to try to post this as a comment to your question, but I can't seem to do so...

I know that the Graph API returns JSON, and while I've never come across a way to have the total number of posts returned, depending on what technology you are using to process the response, you might be able to capture the size of the JSON array containing the posts.

For example, if I were using a java application I could use the libraries available at json.org (or Google GSON, or XStream with the JSON driver) to populate an object and then simply use the JSONArray.length() method to check for the number of posts returned.

see: http://www.json.org/javadoc/org/json/JSONArray.html

It might seem like a bit of a simplistic solution, but might be the type of work around you require if you can't find a way to have Facebook return that data.

Can you specify what technology your application is based in?