Natively Connect to Facebook Ads Data in PHP

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for Facebook Ads into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build Facebook Ads-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to Facebook Ads data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Most tables require user authentication as well as application authentication. Facebook uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate to Facebook, you can use the embedded OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL or you can obtain your own by registering an app with Facebook.

See the Getting Started chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to Facebook Ads by calling the or methods. To close connections, use or .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FacebookAds Source","user","password");

Connections opened with are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC FacebookAds Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM AdAccounts WHERE Name = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FacebookAds Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM AdAccounts WHERE Name = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('Acct Name'));
 

Execute nonparameterized queries with .

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC FacebookAds Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT AccountId, Name FROM AdAccounts WHERE Name = 'Acct Name'");
 

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Facebook Ads data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT AccountId, Name FROM AdAccounts WHERE Name = 'Acct Name'");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["AccountId"] . "\n";
}

Display the result set in an HTML table with the function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Facebook Ads data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM AdAccounts WHERE Name = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('Acct Name'));
if($success)
 odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are Facebook Ads-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.