Spring Social Twitter Oauth

Question

I want to use spring social to develop an twitter app which will update status and upload photos.I am not able to understand how to do Oauth authentication using Spring social.All examples I saw talks about hardcoding the accesstoken which would work only for that particular user.I dont want to hardcode anything except the app keys.

Kindly some one explain me how to do Twitter Oauth using spring social.I went through the official documentation of spring framework but got confused when I saw the other examples..

Thanks

Answer 1

• I saw talks about hardcoding the accesstoken which would work only for that particular user.I dont want to hardcode anything except the app keys.

"app keys" a.k.a. consumer { key, secret } pair authorizes your app to use Twitter APIs that do not require user authentication. Think about it as you app browsing a twitter website without being logged in. Hence you'd have an ability to search, get timelines, etc.. => read only.

In case you'd like to post something back, you'd have to make you app do that on behalf of a real Twitter account / user. Think about someone writing a Twitter client => it can be downloaded by many different users, hence it needs two things to function properly:

• Be a registered Twitter application => have consumer { key, secret } pair
• Be able to post tweets / images on behalf of the user => have access { token, secret } pair

In order to get that access { token, secret } pair, you'd have to have an "OK" from that user/account.

That is where OAuth comes in => it sends the user to the confirmation page, where he clicks "OK, I allow this app to post on my behalf". This "OK" then gets converted to the OAuthToken that your app can use.

If all you want is to post updates on behalf of yourself, then you need to approve your own Twitter app, and persist that OAuthToken to be used by your app.

Unfortunately Twitter does not yet support OAuth 2.0, hence you'd have to do more... You'd have to do OAuth 1.0a.

Spring Social documentation describes the OAuth 1.0a flow here, where you can see the flow visually.

On order to "code" this flow using Spring Social APIs, you should first request access {token, value} pair ( there is a convenience ConnectController for it btw ):

TwitterConnectionFactory connectionFactory = 
    new TwitterConnectionFactory( "consumerKey", "consumerSecret" );
OAuth1Operations oauthOperations = connectionFactory.getOAuthOperations();
OAuthToken requestToken = oauthOperations.fetchRequestToken( "https://my-callback-url", null );
String authorizeUrl = oauthOperations.buildAuthorizeUrl( requestToken, OAuth1Parameters.NONE );
response.sendRedirect( authorizeUrl );

And once it comes back (to your callback URL) you can use OAuth1Operations to get OAuthToken which is exactly that pair.

// upon receiving the callback from the provider:
OAuthToken accessToken = oauthOperations.exchangeForAccessToken(
    new AuthorizedRequestToken(requestToken, oauthVerifier), null);

Now, as you have all you need, you have choices:

Create a TwitterTemplate from that OAuthToken:

String consumerKey = "..."; // The application's consumer key
String consumerSecret = "..."; // The application's consumer secret
String accessToken = accessToken.getValue();
String accessTokenSecret = accessToken.getSecret();
Twitter twitter = new TwitterTemplate( consumerKey, consumerSecret, accessToken, accessTokenSecret );

Create a Twitter Connection object

Connection<Twitter> connection = connectionFactory.createConnection( accessToken );

Once you get the Connection, you might want to persist it via ConnectionRepository as shown here, so you don't have to go through obtaining access token again.

Here is Connection API.

Answer 2

The previous answer is good, but is only part of the story...

There are at least 3 levels at which you may work with Spring Social: (1) Using the TwitterTemplate directly, in which case you'd need to obtain the access token and secret through some means of your own, (2) use OAuth1Template, perhaps through TwitterConnectionFactory as the previous answer showed, to get the access token and from that create the TwitterTemplate, in which case you'd have to handle the redirects and callbacks yourself or (3) use Spring Social's ConnectController to handle everything for you.

Using ConnectController involves the least amount of OAuth work on your part. You just configure the appropriate pieces in Spring and ConnectController takes care of the rest. See http://static.springsource.org/spring-social/docs/1.0.x/reference/html/connecting.html for details.

I encourage you to have a look at the Spring Social Showcase sample at https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-social-samples. It uses ConnectController to handle by Twitter and Facebook connections. And, of course, you're welcome to ask questions on the Spring Social forum at http://forum.springsource.org/forumdisplay.php?82-Social.