Display Your Tweets at SharePoint Portal Using Twitter API

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Social media became one of the influence communication hub around us nowadays. Displaying our social media feeds into SharePoint intranet portal or a website became also highly demanded job.

In this article i will illustrate how to get any twitter account’s tweets and display them into your SharePoint portal step by step.

Let’s get started!

  • Step 1 – Create Twitter Application

The new version of twitter API 1.1 is requiring some sort of authentication keys to be able to use these APIs across your application code-behind. To do so, follow these steps

  1. Navigate to twitter application management page at this link
  2. Log in using any valid twitter account App Management
  3. Click “Create New App” 
  4. Fill all required information, accept application developer rules and click “Create your Twitter application” – Notice that you have to use http at “Website” field.
  5. At this point your application has been created successfully Created
  6. Click “API Keys” tab
  7. You will notice at the top of this page two generated keys as follow : API Key – API Secret
  8. Two more keys still required to be generated: Access token – Access token secret. 
  9. Scroll down to the end of the page to find “Generate my access token” button, click the button to get access token keys
  10. Copy the four keys to a notepad to use them in your SharePoint web part.

Step 2 – Create SharePoint Project

Now let’s move to SharePoint side, for all SharePoint developers completing this step is not a big deal, so i will skip illustrating how to add new visual web part to a SharePoint project using Visual Studio (2012 – 2013). Screen shot below shows a SharePoint project has a visual web part added for displaying twitter tweets.

solution

Step 3 – Install Twitter Package using Visual Studio Package Manager Console

Install Twitter package to add TweetSharp.dll (free library for Twitter API) to SharePoint project using “Visual Studio Package Manager Console (PM)”

  1. In visual studio open “Tools” menu then select “Library Package Manager” then “Package Manager Console” Package Manager
  2. In PM console select nuget.org as source and your default project name to install the package into this project. PM
  3. Get twitter package by writing the following command “Get-Package -Filter Twitter -ListAvailable”PM Twitter
  4. Across all this big list or available packages having the name “Twitter”, select “TweetSharp” package to install by typing the following command “Install-Package TweetSharp”. During the installation, you will notice that the PM is adding some dependencies to your project references which is “Newtonsoft.Json” library, awesome! TweetSharp

Step 4 – Add a New SharePoint Web Part

Now, our SharePoint project is ready to add TweetSharp library reference. Start adding all required controls and code-behind to retrieve Twitter tweets.

  • In markup file add the following controls
<asp:Label ID="lblTwitter" runat="server" Text="Display My Tweets" Font-Bold="true"></asp:Label>
<br />
<asp:Repeater ID="rptTweets" runat="server">
    <ItemTemplate>
        <div style="border:solid 1px">
        <asp:Label ID="lblTweetTime" runat="server" Text='<%#Eval("Created") %>'></asp:Label>
        <br />
        <asp:Literal ID="ltrTweet" runat="server" Text='<%#Eval("Text") %>'></asp:Literal>
        </div>
        <br />
    </ItemTemplate>
</asp:Repeater>

 

  • In code-behind add the following code snippet  (C#)
 protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
 //set all API keys required to authenticate Twitter web service
 string APIKey = "[your key goes here]";
 string APISecret = "[your key goes here]";
 string accessToken = "[your key goes here]";
 string accessTokenSecret = "[your key goes here]";

 //call twitter service
 TwitterService tService = new TwitterService(APIKey, APISecret);
 tService.AuthenticateWith(accessToken, accessTokenSecret);

 //set variable to get tweets collection 
 //note that you can change account name and number or tweets - 200 tweets max
 var tweets = tService.ListTweetsOnUserTimeline(new ListTweetsOnUserTimelineOptions { ScreenName = "asaid_moussa", Count = 5 });
 //create a data table to save tweets
 DataTable dtTweets = new DataTable();
 dtTweets.Clear();
 dtTweets.Columns.Add("Created");
 dtTweets.Columns.Add("Text");

 foreach (var tweet in tweets)
 {
 DataRow row = dtTweets.NewRow();
 row["Created"] = tweet.CreatedDate;
 row["Text"] = tweet.Text;
 dtTweets.Rows.Add(row);
 }

 //bind tweets data table to repeater 
 rptTweets.DataSource = dtTweets;
 rptTweets.DataBind();
 }
  • Build your project then deploy the web part to add it to the SharePoint page, GREAT!

tweets

Note: Don’t forget to add “TweetSharp.dll” and “Newtonsoft.Json.dll” to your bin directory.

You can also add update panel and Timer to update your tweets on a frequent time bases.

 

Enjoy this SharePoint-Twitter bite!

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