Using the Twitter REST API v1.1 from Azure Mobile Services

Since the retirement of the Twitter REST API v1, I have been having trouble doing a simple query using the new search API introduced in version 1.1 from Azure Mobile Services because it now requires a signed authentication header in the request using the OAuth 1.0 protocol.

I would suggest reading the tutorial on Schedule recurring jobs in Mobile Services which provides a basic walk through on creating a scheduled job in Azure Mobile Services that requests tweets from Twitter and stores it in a table. The reason you should read this tutorial is to gain some background knowledge on the concept for better understanding of my newly devised method of use.

The problem with the [out-dated] tutorial mentioned above is that it still uses version 1 of the recently depreciated Twitter REST API.

Current (old) approach

Here's the code for the scheduler borrowed from the [current] tutorial:

After plenty of research (and failed attempts) on properly signing the request to have Twitter authenticate it using custom code, I realised that Azure Mobile Services is hosted by a NodeJs process and learned that the 'Request'-object comes out-of-the-box with OAuth support.

New (updated) approach

By simply assigning the application's keys and tokens to the OAuth property of the request, it worked like a charm:

Do take note

There are some breaking changes to the API therefor I strongly recommend studying the Twitter API 1.1 documentation. Some of the other changes I had to make to the original code include changing the expected response body property 'results' to 'statuses' as well as the mapping to the.'update' object.

I hope that this saves someone out there somewhere a lot of trouble and time.

Your comments and tweets are welcome. @FanieReynders.

Till next time!