Relation between Twitter replies

Question

I have a big problem with the Twitter API. Currently Twitter doesn't support fetching Tweets with their associated replies.

I would like to grap the mentions of the timeline and associate them with their replies.

Until this step everything is fine. Now my problem. I would like to add also the children replies of a reply to get a full relation between the mention and the replies.

Currently I fetch the timeline and split the results into mentions and replies.

public void fetchTwitterTimeline(long sinceId) {
 try {
   Paging timelinePaging = new Paging();

   if (sinceId > 0) {
     timelinePaging.setSinceId(sinceId);
   }
   LOG.debug("Fetching Twitter Timeline");
   ResponseList<Status> statusResponseList = twitterClient.getMentionsTimeline(timelinePaging);
   assignTwitterStatusResponse(statusResponseList);
 } catch(TwitterException e){
   e.getStackTrace();
   System.out.println(e);
   LOG.error("Could not fetch Twitter Timeline: {}", e);
  }
}

private void assignTwitterStatusResponse(ResponseList<Status> statusResponseList) {
 for (Status status : statusResponseList) {
   if (status.isRetweet()) {
     continue;
   }

   if (status.getInReplyToStatusId() > 0) {
     replies.add(status);
   } else {
     mentions.add(status);
   }
 } 
}

Answer 1

So thanks a lot for your response. Now I have a good solution also for those who has the same problems with it.

public List<Status> fetchTwitterThread(long tweetId) throws TwitterException {
   Paging timelinePaging = new Paging();
   timelinePaging.setSinceId(tweetId);

   ResponseList<Status> statusResponseList = twitterClient.getMentionsTimeline(timelinePaging);
   statusResponseList.addAll(twitterClient.getHomeTimeline(timelinePaging));

   List<Status> thread = new ArrayList<>();
   thread.add(getStatusById(tweetId)); // Add root status

   fetchTwitterThread(tweetId, statusResponseList, thread);

   return thread;
}

private void fetchTwitterThread(long parentId, ResponseList<Status> statusResponseList, List<Status> thread) {
  for (Status status : statusResponseList) {
    if (status.getInReplyToStatusId() == parentId) {
      thread.add(status);
      fetchTwitterThread(status.getId(), statusResponseList, thread);
    }
  }
}

I have two methods. This will be needed if you want to save some API calls. In the first step I fetch the mentionsTimeline and the hometimeline since the requested id. This is necessary for you own tweets and replies.

After that I've implemented a second method as a recursion. I iterate through the responseList and if one status (inReplyToStatusId) matches with the parentId, I add them to the thread.

Answer 2

There is an API call to get the replies to the tweets.

It is conversation/show/:ID - so to get all the replies to Tweet ID 123 you'd call conversation/show/123

The only problem is that this API is restricted to Twitter's official API keys.