Feeding into the Twitter In Node in Node-Red

Question

I'm trying to use my website to feed in values to the Node-Red Twitter Input node, however I'm struggling to find any way to this. On research, I've found this answer: Using Twitter node in Node-RED in Bluemix

You cannot pass the search text dynamically, you have to configure it in the node via the editor

But he does not mention why or whether there is any other way to do it. Therefore, my question:

Does anyone know of a method to do this? Or any other way of going about it?

The node itself doesn't seem to want to accept any other nodes at all (it has no grey dot to the left of it to connect to other nodes). Would I have to do something like, re-write the node so that it can accept values?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

As Nick said in the other answer, the Twitter node can only change it's search string by using the Node-RED editor to change the value and redeploy the flow. It can not be dynamically changed.

If you want to make it dynamic you will have to write your own node. But be aware that each time you change the search string this will drop the connection to Twitter and re-establish it, which will burn through the API rate limiting, which is very likely to limit the amount of tweets you can return.