Does TWRequest work for the twitter streaming api?

Question

I am trying to make a basic iphone app that shows nearby tweets. I was using the TWRequest object to accomplish this with the twitter search api. Unfortunately, I would actually like to mark the tweets on a map using their GPS coordinates and the search api doesn't seem to return the actual location that a tweet was made with any better accuracy than the city name.

As such, I think I need to switch to the streaming api. I am wondering if it is possible to continue using the TWRequest object in this case or if I need to actually switch over to using NSURLConnection? Thanks in advance!

Avtar

Answer 1

It took me a bit of time to get this up and running, So I thought I aught to post my code for others. In my case I was trying to get tweets close to a certain location, so you will see that I used a locations parameter and a location struct I had in scope. You can add whatever params you want to the params dictionary.

Also note that this is bare bones, and you will want to do things such as notify the user that an account was not found and allow the user to select the twitter account they would like to use if multiple accounts exist.

Happy Streaming!

//First, we need to obtain the account instance for the user's Twitter account
ACAccountStore *store = [[ACAccountStore alloc] init];
ACAccountType *twitterAccountType = [store accountTypeWithAccountTypeIdentifier:ACAccountTypeIdentifierTwitter];

//  Request permission from the user to access the available Twitter accounts
[store requestAccessToAccountsWithType:twitterAccountType
                 withCompletionHandler:^(BOOL granted, NSError *error) {
                     if (!granted) {
                         // The user rejected your request
                         NSLog(@"User rejected access to the account.");
                     }
                     else {
                         // Grab the available accounts
                         NSArray *twitterAccounts = [store accountsWithAccountType:twitterAccountType];
                         if ([twitterAccounts count] > 0) {
                             // Use the first account for simplicity
                             ACAccount *account = [twitterAccounts objectAtIndex:0];
                             NSMutableDictionary *params = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
                             [params setObject:@"1" forKey:@"include_entities"];
                             [params setObject:location forKey:@"locations"];
                             [params setObject:@"true" forKey:@"stall_warnings"];
                             //set any other criteria to track
                             //params setObject:@"words, to, track" forKey@"track"];

                             //  The endpoint that we wish to call
                             NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"https://stream.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/filter.json"];

                             //  Build the request with our parameter
                             TWRequest *request = [[TWRequest alloc] initWithURL:url
                                                                      parameters:params
                                                                   requestMethod:TWRequestMethodPOST];

                             // Attach the account object to this request
                             [request setAccount:account];
                             NSURLRequest *signedReq = request.signedURLRequest;

                             // make the connection, ensuring that it is made on the main runloop
                             self.twitterConnection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:signedReq delegate:self startImmediately: NO];
                             [self.twitterConnection scheduleInRunLoop:[NSRunLoop mainRunLoop]
                                                   forMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode];
                             [self.twitterConnection start];

                         } // if ([twitterAccounts count] > 0)
                     } // if (granted) 
                 }];

Answer 2

Yes, you can use a TWRequest object. Create your TWRequest object using the appropriate URL and parameters from the Twitter API doco, and set the TWRequest.account property to the ACAccount object for the Twitter account.

You can then use the signedURLRequest method of TWRequest to get an NSURLRequest which can be used to create an asynchronous NSURLConnection using connectionWithRequest:delegate:.

Once this is done, the delegate's connection:didReceiveData: method will be called whenever data is received from Twitter. Note that each NSData object received may contain more than one JSON object. You will need to split these up (separated by "\r\n") before converting each one from JSON using NSJSONSerialization.