MissingAuthorizationException: Getting last tweets

Question

Why is it needed to be authorized when I just want the last 2 tweets? I would like to create a minimal config as I don't need the connection stuff. And as I understand the twitter api it is not necessary to have a consumerKey/consumerSecret for just getting some tweets?!

Bean:

<bean id="twitter" class="org.springframework.social.twitter.api.impl.TwitterTemplate" />

Spring Controller:

@Controller
public class FragmentController {
    @Autowired
    private Twitter twitter;

    @ModelAttribute
    public void global(ModelMap map) {
        map.addAttribute("tweets", twitter.timelineOperations().getUserTimeline("myTwitterUsername", 2));
    }

    @RequestMapping("index.html")
    public String index() {
        return "index";
    }
}

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 02 '13 at 01:36

As of the release of version 1.1 of Twitter's API, all operations against the API require authorization, including those that you would think do not need it.

That said, you do not necessarily need user authorization to request resources that would otherwise be public and not private to any specific user. A specified user's tweets, for instance, can be had without user authorization. But you still need application authorization.

This is where Twitter's API gets a bit weird. For user authorization, Twitter is secured with OAuth 1.0a and this applies to all (or most all) resources at Twitter. For app-only authorization, Twitter uses OAuth 2 client credentials grant. This kind of authorization applies to a subset of the whole API.

Fortunately, Spring Social supports this in the very latest snapshot build (1.1.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT). Via OAuth2Template, you can call authenticateClient() to obtain an AccessGrant (and from that obtain an access token). Then you can create an instance of TwitterTemplate, passing in only the client's access token and use it to access Twitter's API for those operations that access app-only authorization.

Know that when I say "very latest snapshot build", that's quite literal. I pushed the changes to TwitterTemplate last last night and it could still stand some more testing. I have tested it a bit with regard to search, but all other resources are relatively untested. If you run into any issues, please let me know by creating a bug issue at https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SOCIALTW.

MissingAuthorizationException: Getting last tweets

1 Answers1