SamLogic's Twitter Component:
SLTwitCtrl ActiveX Control
 Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service on the Internet
that let users send and read short text-based messages. Every message,
also known as a "tweet", can be up to 140 characters long, and can also
contain links (URLs) that open other web pages or other messages on
Twitter.
SLTwitCtrl is an ActiveX component (ActiveX control) from
SamLogic Software that let you handle Twitter from your software, for
example from your desktop application. With the SLTwitCtrl
component you can post messages (tweets) directly from your application
to your Twitter account - you don't need to open a web page to handle
this. The ActiveX component communicates with Twitter via Twitter's REST
API.
The SLTwitCtrl component can also shorten a URL in a message by
using the well-known Bitly service.
As mentioned above a tweet can contain a URL (a web address), but the
140 character limit makes it hard to use a full length web address for a
link in a message. By using a shortening service a tweet can contain
a long web
addresses without taking up to many characters of the tweet. But if
you don't want to use Bitly to shorten your URLs you can also let
Twitter shorten the URL.
| Before you can use the Twitter
component in your application you need to register your
application at Twitter. This is an easy process and you can
check this
page for more information. |
Below are all properties and methods in the
SLTwitCtrl ActiveX control described.
Properties
|
Name |
Type |
Description |
|
AppName |
String |
Specifies the name
of your application. This must be exactly the same application name that
your registered at Twitter.
. |
|
BitlyAPIKey |
String |
Only if you use the
Bitly URL shortening service. The API key at Bitly.
. |
|
BitlyUsername |
String |
Only if you use the
Bitly URL shortening service. Your username at Bitly.
. |
|
ConsumerKey |
String |
Specifies the
consumer key for your application.
. |
|
ConsumerSecret |
String |
Specifies the
consumer secret for your application.
. |
|
Password |
String |
Specifies the
password for the Twitter account that will receive the Twitter
message (the tweet). This can be any account.
. |
|
ReuseToken |
Boolean |
If this property is
set to True the ActiveX component will reuse previous
used tokens during the authentication process with Twitter. This
will speed up the communication with Twitter and allow messages
to be sent faster.
. |
|
Username |
String |
Specifies the
username for the Twitter account that will receive the Twitter
message (the tweet). This can be any account.
. |
Methods
|
Method Name and Description |
Posting
Messages / Tweets
TwitPostMessage
(ByVal
sMessage As String) As Boolean
Posts a message (tweet)
to Twitter. The message to send is specified via the
sMessage parameter. The method
returns True if successful,
or
False if an error occurs. If an error occurs, more information can
be retrieved via the TwitGetLastError
and TwitGetLastResponse method.
URL Shortening
TwitShortenURL (ByVal sURL As
String, ByVal iService As Integer) As String
Shortens a URL specified
via the sURL parameter. The
shortened URL is returned by the method. The
iService parameter specifies which
shortening service to use. Currently is only Bitly supported,
which equals to 1 (for the parameter). You can also set the
iService parameter to 0. In this
case the default service will be used, which currently is also
Bitly.
TwitShortenURLInMessage (ByVal sMessage As String, ByVal
iService As Integer) As String
Shortens URLs in a
message that is specified via the sMessage
parameter. An updated message string, with shortened URLs, is
returned by the method. If no URLs are found in the message
string, the string is unchanged. The
iService parameter specifies which shortening service to
use. See the TwitShortenURL method
for more information.
TwitGetURLsFromMessage (ByVal sMessage As String, sURL1 As
String, sURL2 As String)
Extracts URLs from a
message. Up to two URLs can be extracted with this method. The
first two URLs found is retrieved. If you want to use another
URL shortening service (that is not supported by the component)
you use this method to get the URLs in a message. Thereafter you
can replace the URLs with shortened versions.
Error handling
TwitGetLastError
() As Long
Returns an error code for the last error that
occurred in the ActiveX control. If this method returns 0, there is no
error to report. If the error code is > 1000, Twitter API
returned an error and you can use the
TwitGetLastResponse method to get details about the
error. A list with possible error codes is available
on this web page.
TwitGetLastResponse (ByVal sReplyMessage As String)
Returns the last response
from Twitter API. If an error occurs during the communication
with Twitter you can call this method to check what message
Twitter returned. The message is stored in the XML format.
|
Examples of use
You can open one of the code
example pages below to
get code examples on how to use the
SLTwitCtrl ActiveX control. Code examples in Microsoft Visual
Basic and Microsoft Visual C++ are available:
>
Code Examples - Microsoft
Visual Basic
> Code Examples - Microsoft
Visual C++
Distribution / Installation
On
this web page we will
describe how to install the
SLTwitCtrl component in end-users' computers and lists which
files that must be distributed with your project.
System requirements
The ActiveX control can be used in Windows 2000, Windows XP,
Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. It can also be used in
all server versions of Windows since Windows 2000 server. The
control can be used in all programming languages and development
platforms that supports the ActiveX technology. For example
Visual Basic 6.0, Visual Basic .NET (2003-2013), Visual C#, C++ etc. The
SLTwitCtrl ActiveX control supports REST v1.1, which is the API
that Twitter is currently using. |
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|
| Part of SamLogic
Social Media Components |
|
