Is it possible to get Direct Messages from Twitter by a specific user using the Twitter4j library?

Question

I'm using the Twitter4j library to develop a proyect that works with Twitter, one of the things what I need is to get the Direct messages, I'm using the following code:

try{
    List<DirectMessage> loStatusList = loTwitter.getDirectMessages();
    for (DirectMessage loStatus : loStatusList) {
        System.out.println(loStatus.getId() + ",@" + loStatus.getSenderScreenName() + "," + loStatus.getText() + "|");
    }
}
catch(Exception e)

It works fine, but what the code returns is a list of the most recent messages in general. What I want is to get those direct messages using some kind of filter that allows finding them by a user that I indicate.

For example, I need to see the DM only from user @TwitterUser.

Is this posible with this library?

All kinds of suggestions are accepted, even if I should use another library I would be grateful if you let me know.

Answer 1

It looks like the actual Twitter API doesn't support a direct filter on that API, by username anyway. (See Twitter API doc: GET direct_messages.)

Which means, you'd have to make multiple calls to the API with pagination enabled, and cache the responses into a list.

Here is an example of pagination wtih Twitter4J getDirectMessages().

In that example, use the existing:

List<DirectMessage> messages;

But inside the loop, do:

messages.addAll(twitter.getDirectMessages(paging));

Note: you only would have to do this once. And in fact, you should persist these to a durable local cache like Redis or something. Because once you have the last message id, you can ask the Twitter API to only return "messages since id" with the since_id param.

Anyway, then on the client side you'd just do your filtering with the usual means in Java. For example:

// Joe is on twitter as @joe
private static final String AT_JOE = "Joe";

// Java 8 Lambda to filter by screen name
List<DirectMessage> messagesFromJoe = messages.stream()
    .filter(message -> message.getSenderScreenName().equals(AT_JOE))
    .collect(Collectors.toList());

Above, getSenderScreenName() was discovered by reading the Twitter4J API doc for DirectMessage.