Getting Twitter followers list using Social framework in iOS.

This article presents a useful code snippets for interacting with Twitter’s Friends & Followers REST APIs, which provide simple interfaces for most Twitter functionality.

It shows how to implement getting Twitter followers list and friends list in iOS using Social and Accounts frameworks.

Getting list of followers.

To get list of followers, we will contact the following endpoint.

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/followers/list.json

We will pass the screen name of the currently logged in user as a query parameter.
As a result, we will get a collection of user objects for users following the specified user.

Implementation

ACAccountStore *accountStore = [[ACAccountStore alloc] init];
    ACAccountType *accountType = [accountStore accountTypeWithAccountTypeIdentifier:ACAccountTypeIdentifierTwitter];
    
    [accountStore requestAccessToAccountsWithType:accountType
                                          options:nil
                                       completion:^(BOOL granted,
                                                    NSError *error)
    {
        if (granted)
        {
            NSArray *accounts = [accountStore accountsWithAccountType:accountType];
            
            // Check if the users has setup at least one Twitter account.
            if (accounts.count > 0)
            {
                ACAccount *twitterAccount = [accounts objectAtIndex:0];
                
                NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"https://api.twitter.com/1.1/followers/list.json"];
                NSDictionary *parameters = @{@"screen_name" : twitterAccount.username};
                
                // Creating a request.
                SLRequest *request = [SLRequest requestForServiceType:SLServiceTypeTwitter
                                                        requestMethod:SLRequestMethodGET
                                                                  URL:url
                                                           parameters:parameters];
                [request setAccount:twitterAccount];
                
                // Perform the request.
                [request performRequestWithHandler:^(NSData *responseData,
                                                     NSHTTPURLResponse *urlResponse,
                                                     NSError *error)
                {
                    dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^
                    {
                        // Check if we reached the rate limit.
                        if ([urlResponse statusCode] == 429)
                        {
                            NSLog(@"Rate limit reached");
                            return;
                        }
                        
                        // Check if there was an error
                        if (error)
                        {
                            NSLog(@"Error: %@", error.localizedDescription);
                            return;
                        }
                        
                        // Check if there is some response data.
                        if (responseData)
                        {
                            NSError *error = nil;
                            NSDictionary *dictionary = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:responseData
                                                                              options:NSJSONReadingMutableLeaves
                                                                                error:&error];
                            
                            NSArray *users = dictionary[@"users"];
                            
                            NSLog(@"Users: %@", users);
                        }
                    });
                }];
            }
            else
            {
                NSLog(@"No accounts");
            }
        } else {
            NSLog(@"No access granted");
        }
    }];

Getting list of followed users (friends).

To get list of the users you follow, the only thing we have to change is the URL of the endpoint

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/friends/list.json

The endpoint returns a cursored collection of user objects for every user the specified user is following (otherwise known as their “friends”).

More information about Twitter’s REST API can be found in the REST API v1.1 Resources.

Rate limit

Twitter’s API introduces a rate limit. When an application exceeds the rate limit for a given API endpoint, the Twitter API will return an HTTP 429 “Too Many Requests” response code instead of the variety of codes you would find across the REST APIs.

The limits are quite low and they can be easily hit. You can read more about them here.

The post Getting Twitter followers list using Social framework in iOS. appeared first on stunning co.de.