Using Twitter OAuth via API 1.1 without 3rd Party Library

Question

I am facing trouble in using GET statuses/user_timeline with OAuth.

I am new to twitter & programming. Most of the help I see in the documentation are for POST.

Earlier I was using : http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=userid

Now based on new API, I am trying to use: https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=userid. But I get "The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request".

I made an application in dev.twitter.com. I also managed to generate a signature. Now i dont know how to post the signature and get the output. I using C# web forms .net 3.5. I cannot use a 3rd party library like twitterizer.

I followed the thread at Get twitter public timeline, json+C#, no 3rd party libraries and the two follow up threads. Something is going wrong. I am assuming that its something to do with API 1.1.

Answer 1

Here you go (change the "update me" section) :

        // oauth application keys
        var oauth_token = "update me";
        var oauth_token_secret = "update me";
        var oauth_consumer_key = "update me";
        var oauth_consumer_secret = "update me";

        // oauth implementation details
        var oauth_version = "1.0";
        var oauth_signature_method = "HMAC-SHA1";

        // unique request details
        var oauth_nonce = Convert.ToBase64String(
            new ASCIIEncoding().GetBytes(DateTime.Now.Ticks.ToString()));
        var timeSpan = DateTime.UtcNow
            - new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc);
        var oauth_timestamp = Convert.ToInt64(timeSpan.TotalSeconds).ToString();

        // message api details
        var status = "Updating status via REST API if this works";
        var resource_url = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json";
        var screen_name = "updateme";
        // create oauth signature
        var baseFormat = "oauth_consumer_key={0}&oauth_nonce={1}&oauth_signature_method={2}" +
                        "&oauth_timestamp={3}&oauth_token={4}&oauth_version={5}&screen_name={6}";

        var baseString = string.Format(baseFormat,
                                    oauth_consumer_key,
                                    oauth_nonce,
                                    oauth_signature_method,
                                    oauth_timestamp,
                                    oauth_token,
                                    oauth_version,
                                     Uri.EscapeDataString(screen_name)
                                    );

        baseString = string.Concat("GET&", Uri.EscapeDataString(resource_url), "&", Uri.EscapeDataString(baseString));

        var compositeKey = string.Concat(Uri.EscapeDataString(oauth_consumer_secret),
                                "&", Uri.EscapeDataString(oauth_token_secret));

        string oauth_signature;
        using (HMACSHA1 hasher = new HMACSHA1(ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetBytes(compositeKey)))
        {
            oauth_signature = Convert.ToBase64String(
                hasher.ComputeHash(ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetBytes(baseString)));
        }

        // create the request header
        var headerFormat = "OAuth oauth_nonce=\"{0}\", oauth_signature_method=\"{1}\", " +
                           "oauth_timestamp=\"{2}\", oauth_consumer_key=\"{3}\", " +
                           "oauth_token=\"{4}\", oauth_signature=\"{5}\", " +
                           "oauth_version=\"{6}\"";

        var authHeader = string.Format(headerFormat,
                                Uri.EscapeDataString(oauth_nonce),
                                Uri.EscapeDataString(oauth_signature_method),
                                Uri.EscapeDataString(oauth_timestamp),
                                Uri.EscapeDataString(oauth_consumer_key),
                                Uri.EscapeDataString(oauth_token),
                                Uri.EscapeDataString(oauth_signature),
                                Uri.EscapeDataString(oauth_version)
                        );


        // make the request

        ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;

        var postBody = "screen_name=" + Uri.EscapeDataString(screen_name);//
        resource_url += "?" + postBody;
        HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(resource_url);
        request.Headers.Add("Authorization", authHeader);
        request.Method = "GET";
        request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";


        WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
        string responseData = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd();

Answer 2

I have just faced a similar problem to this but solved it in a different way in

Authenticate and request a user's timeline with Twitter API 1.1 oAuth

I created a GitHub project at https://github.com/andyhutch77/oAuthTwitterTimeline