I've been working on this application to send out tweets at a particular time. One thing thing I want to do is be able to look at the logged in user's timeline. I've been playing with the ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX Previews, so I thought I would marry the two. As a result, I wrote the WCF code below in C#. Note that the password is hidden, so the code won't work until you add that in. Basically, I make a request to get the friends timeline. This gives me the most recent 20 posts by default. I store the result in an XmlDocument. I need to get that data out as a complex object of type UserStatusSvc as I am returning an array of that type. I used Linq to Xml for that.
[OperationContract]
public UserStatusSvc[] GetUserTimeLine(string username)
{
string url = "http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml";
//string user = Convert.ToBase64String(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(username + ":" + password));
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url);
request.Method = "POST";
request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password);
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
string responseString = reader.ReadToEnd();
reader.Close();
XmlDocument xmld = new XmlDocument();
xmld.LoadXml(responseString);
XDocument document = XDocument.Parse(responseString);
var query = from e in document.Root.Descendants()
where e.Element("user") != null
select new UserStatusSvc
{
UserName = e.Element("user").Element("screen_name").Value,
ProfileImage = e.Element("user").Element("profile_image_url").Value,
Status = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(e.Element("text").Value),
StatusDate = e.Value.ParseDateTime().ToString()
};
var users = (from u in query
where u.Status != ""
select u).ToList();
return (users.ToArray());
}
Here's the definition of my UserStatusSvc object.
[DataContract]
public class UserStatusSvc
{
[DataMember]
public string UserName { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string ProfileImage { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string Status { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string StatusDate { get; set; }
}
public static class StringExtensions
{
public static DateTime ParseDateTime(this string date)
{
string dayOfWeek = date.Substring(0, 3).Trim();
string month = date.Substring(4, 3).Trim();
string dayInMonth = date.Substring(8, 2).Trim();
string time = date.Substring(11, 9).Trim();
string offset = date.Substring(20, 5).Trim();
string year = date.Substring(25, 5).Trim();
string dateTime = string.Format("{0}-{1}-{2} {3}", dayInMonth, month, year, time);
DateTime ret = DateTime.Parse(dateTime);
return ret;
}
}
Thanks to Tim Heuer for some code he posted on his blog to get me started. I have primarily stolen his code and reposted it here. :-)
PS. I modified this code example to remove the hokey CheckForNull(...). It was stupid and not necessary. I didn't realize I had left it in until I got hassled for it. The line 'where Element("user") != null' resolved my problem.