NOTE: LINQ to Twitter is now hosted on GitHub:
Go To:
LINQ to Twitter on GitHub
LINQ to Twitter is an open source 3rd party LINQ Provider for the
Twitter micro-blogging service. It uses standard LINQ syntax for queries and includes method calls for changes via the
Twitter API.
Example
The following query returns search results where people are tweeting about LINQ to Twitter:
var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(...);
var searchResponse =
await
(from search in twitterCtx.Search
where search.Type == SearchType.Search &&
search.Query == "\"LINQ to Twitter\""
select search)
.SingleOrDefaultAsync();
if (searchResponse != null && searchResponse.Statuses != null)
searchResponse.Statuses.ForEach(tweet =>
Console.WriteLine(
"User: {0}, Tweet: {1}",
tweet.User.ScreenNameResponse,
tweet.Text));
From a coding experience perspective, the
TwitterContext type is analogous to
DataContext (LINQ to SQL) or
ObjectContext (LINQ to Entities). You use the
TwitterContext instance,
twitterCtx, to access
IQueryable<T> tweet categories. In the example above, the
Search will give you the ability to search Twitter for tweets meeting some criteria.
Each query category has a
Type property for the type of tweets you want to get back. For example,
Status tweets can be made for
Home,
Mentions, or
User timelines. Each query category also has an
XxxType enum to help you figure out what is available. The example above uses
SearchType.Search to perform searches. Another example would be
Status queries which might have
StatusType.Home as its
Type. In the case of
Search queries,
Search is the only option, but the
Type idiom is consistent accross all query categories.
Just like other LINQ providers, you get an
IQueryable<T> back from the query. You can see how to materialize the query by invoking the
Single operator. For
Search results, you receive one
Search entity that contains information about the
Search query and the
Search entity contains a
Results property that is a collection of
SearchResult entities. On other queries, you would materialize the query with
ToList for multiple results. Just like other LINQ providers, LINQ to Twitter does deferred execution, so operators such as
ToList and
Single or statements such as
for and
foreach loops will cause the query to execute and make the actual call to Twitter.
The latest version of LINQ to Twitter supports async. You can see this where the code above
await's the query, using the
SingleOrDefaultAsync() operator. Commands are async also. e.g.
TweetAsync().
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