SharePoint as a Twitter Client. Sort of – Part One

This is going to be quite lengthy so I’ll split into a couple of posts.

Back in March, Mark Wilson of MarkWilson.co.uk (if you’re not reading his blog….go check it out now!) asked the following on Twitter.

Does anyone know how to read XML (i.e. Twitter updates) into a SharePoint List (not the XML webpart reading it dynamically)?

Since I like a challenge I decided to take a look at it.

If you search (using your favourite search engine) for Twitter and SharePoint you’ll find one of two things.

Either, examples of how to use a webpart to grab the RSS feed of someone’s Twitter status or people creating a Twitter-like application using SharePoint (which is pretty cool anyway).

What Mark was looking for was something slightly different.

He wanted to collect posts from a specific user into a SharePoint list. In effect creating an archive that a team could view. They could even use SharePoint to create views to look for keywords.

This meant the webpart wouldn’t do as it only shows a snapshot of the current status updates. If the particular user tweets quite a lot you could miss stuff.

Mark initially pointed me in the direction of the RSS feeds for each user (here’s mine) but this gives us a similar problem to the webpart as it only shows the last 20 tweets.

This was when I stepped out of my comfort zone and started looking at the Twitter API 

It turns out the Twitter API isn’t actually very complicated. All you need to do is craft a URL to pass certain parameters and it’ll throw some XML back at you.

For example,

This url will retrieve an XML file containing my last five tweets.

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=AndyParkes&count=5 (you can click this even if you don’t have a Twitter account. Authentication is only needed for protected accounts)

So I’d now found a way of grabbing the tweets…but how to get them into a SharePoint list?

IF I were a SharePoint developer armed with a copy of Visual Studio I actually don’t think this would be all that difficult to do. (you’ll see why in one of the later parts to this post)

However, since I’m not I need to make use of the tools at my disposal.

I had to think of something that can make use of XML but also talk to SharePoint and the answer is….

Microsoft Access

Yep..seriously.

Access has the ability to import XML files into a table.

Access also has the ability to link to a SharePoint list and update it.

By putting these two bits of functionality together I was actually able to reach the desired effect.

You can try it yourself.

Open Access and create a new blank database.

Click the External Data tab and choose XML file.

Access 2010 screenshot – procedure is similar in Access 2007 though

Enter your API URL into the file name field. The URL I’m using will return my last 20 tweets

You’ll be prompted to verify the import

Choose structure and data first time round so you actually create the tables

On subsequent runs you can just append the data

Done…you can save the import steps if you want so you can repeat this without going through the whole wizard again.

I’ve now got my last 20 tweets into an Access database.

You’ll notice there are actually two tables created.

Status contains the tweets.

User contains the details about the user this is being pulled from –it’s part of the XML returned.

So to get it into SharePoint.

Select the status table, click the External Data tab again this time use the Export section and select SharePoint list.

Run through the export wizard.

Choose a destination site.

You’ll see it creating the tables.

Done!

You can then browse to your site and view the list!

You can also create a view to just show the important fields.

TaDa!……well not quite.

Currently it’s not very dynamic.

All it does is fetch the last 20 updates. If you re-ran the process above again you’d run into problems doing the SharePoint export as the status table already exists you’d end up with multiple lists (eg. status, status_1, status,2)

Also it’s not smart enough to realise that if we already have some tweets in the database we don’t want to re-add those. If you followed the procedure above for a second time you’d also end up with duplicate tweets.

Finally if you tried to put them into chronological order you may notice the sort doesn’t quite work under certain circumstances.

So in the next part we’ll put Access to work to make this a bit more intelligent and finally automate the whole thing so it’ll fetch the tweets all by itself!