How can I pull in a user's tweets using the new Twitter API v1.1?

Question

So I'm currently using this to pull in a certain number of tweets from a user:

public void GetTweets(string username, int tweetCount)
{
    var url = string.Format(
         "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name={0}&count={1}", 
         username, tweetCount);
    XDocument xml = XDocument.Load(url);

    // parse xml
}

With the new API version, this will no longer be allowed, I'll have to send a GET request with JSON: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/statuses/user_timeline

Where I get lost is with needing to be authenticated with OAuth. Do I need a Twitter account for this? I've looked around for an example or tutorial of doing this with .NET and haven't been able to find anything, just links back to the twitter dev page for v1.1

Can someone guide me in the right direction?

Answer 1

Do I need a Twitter account for this?

Twitter supports both user-based authentication and application-based authentication, so if you don't want to authenticate with a Twitter user account you don't have to. Full details here:

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/application-only-auth

That said, my advice is to go with user-based authentication. It's by far the most common way to authenticate with Twitter and therefore it'll be easier to find documentation and code samples for. Here's some examples:

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/oauth/single-user-with-examples

Answer 2

You do need a Twitter account, and you need to obtain a "consumer key" and "consumer secret". You do that by creating an App at https://dev.twitter.com/apps.

Here's a method in an IHttpHandler that you could adapt once you have those. It provides the same functionality to client side script that the https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json endpoint did. It requests the 1.1 version of that data after authenticating, so it will only work for your app.

For doing anything more complex than getting tweets, a proper OAuth handshake should be used - try the TweetSharp library: https://github.com/danielcrenna/tweetsharp

The code below follows the process described at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/application-only-auth, but it does not do all the SSL checks described here - https://dev.twitter.com/docs/security/using-ssl.

public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
{
    // get these from somewhere nice and secure...
    var key = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["twitterConsumerKey"];
    var secret = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["twitterConsumerSecret"];
    var server = HttpContext.Current.Server;
    var bearerToken = server.UrlEncode(key) + ":" + server.UrlEncode(secret);
    var b64Bearer = Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.Default.GetBytes(bearerToken));
    using (var wc = new WebClient())
    {
        wc.Headers.Add("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8");
        wc.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Basic " + b64Bearer);
        var tokenPayload = wc.UploadString("https://api.twitter.com/oauth2/token", "grant_type=client_credentials");
        var rgx = new Regex("\"access_token\"\\s*:\\s*\"([^\"]*)\"");
        // you can store this accessToken and just do the next bit if you want
        var accessToken = rgx.Match(tokenPayload).Groups[1].Value;
        wc.Headers.Clear();
        wc.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Bearer " + accessToken);

        const string url = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=YourTwitterHandle&count=4";
        // ...or you could pass through the query string and use this handler as if it was the old user_timeline.json
        // but only with YOUR Twitter account

        var tweets = wc.DownloadString(url);
        //do something sensible for caching here:
        context.Response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "public, s-maxage=300, max-age=300");
        context.Response.AppendHeader("Last-Modified", DateTime.Now.ToString("r", DateTimeFormatInfo.InvariantInfo));
        context.Response.AppendHeader("Expires", DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(5).ToString("r", DateTimeFormatInfo.InvariantInfo));
        context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; 
        context.Response.Write(tweets);
    }
}

You could:

• store the value obtained for accessToken for later use, you don't need to get it every time.
• Pass through parameters on the query string - I think user_timeline.json accepts the same parameters as the v1 version.
• set cache-related HTTP headers as appropriate - it's essential you cache this response to avoid running into request limits.
• Deserialise the JSON on the server and do something different with it. But if you're doing that, maybe just use TweetSharp directly. This is really for providing the same JSON data to client side script that previously worked with API v1.