Log in with Twitter

The TwitterCore Kit provides log in with Twitter. This feature enables application users to authenticate with Twitter.

Note

If you’re not using Fabric’s auto-generated Twitter credentials, before using this feature, ensure that “Allow this application to be used to Sign in to Twitter” is checked for your Twitter app.

When attempting to obtain an authentication token, the Kit will use the locally installed Twitter app to offer a single sign-on experience. If the Kit is unable to access the authentication token through the Twitter app, it falls back to using a web view to finish the OAuth process.

The simplest way to authenticate a user is using TwitterLoginButton. Inside your layout, add a Login button with the following code:

<com.twitter.sdk.android.core.identity.TwitterLoginButton
     android:id="@+id/login_button"
     android:layout_width="wrap_content"
     android:layout_height="wrap_content" />

This will render a button that looks like:

Configure the button in an Activity

In the Activity or Fragment that displays the button, you need to create and attach a Callback to the Login Button.

import com.twitter.sdk.android.core.Callback;
import com.twitter.sdk.android.core.Result;
import com.twitter.sdk.android.core.TwitterException;
import com.twitter.sdk.android.core.TwitterSession;
import com.twitter.sdk.android.core.identity
                                                  .TwitterLoginButton;
...

loginButton = (TwitterLoginButton) 
                              findViewById(R.id.login_button);
loginButton.setCallback(new Callback<TwitterSession>() {
   @Override
   public void success(Result<TwitterSession> result) {
       // Do something with result, which provides a 
       // TwitterSession for making API calls
   }

   @Override
   public void failure(TwitterException exception) {
       // Do something on failure
   }
});

Pass the Activity’s result back to the button

Next, pass the result of the authentication Activity back to the button:

@Override
protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
    super.onActivityResult(requestCode, resultCode, data);

    // Pass the activity result to the login button.
    loginButton.onActivityResult(requestCode, resultCode, 
                                                                        data);
}

Note

If using the TwitterLoginButton in a Fragment, use the following steps instead.

Inside the Activity hosting the Fragment, pass the result from the Activity to the Fragment.

@Override
protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
    super.onActivityResult(requestCode, resultCode, data);

    // Pass the activity result to the fragment, which will 
    // then pass the result to the login button.
    Fragment fragment = getFragmentManager()
                .findFragmentById(R.id.your_fragment_id);
    if (fragment != null) {
        fragment.onActivityResult(requestCode, resultCode, data);
    }
}

TwitterSession

If logIn completes successfully, a TwitterSession is provided in the success result. This TwitterSession will contain a token, secret, username, and user ID of the user and becomes the active session and is automatically persisted. If you need to retrieve the TwitterSession at a later time, you may do so using the SessionManager.

TwitterSession session = 
        Twitter.getSessionManager().getActiveSession();
TwitterAuthToken authToken = session.getAuthToken();
String token = authToken.token;
String secret = authToken.secret;

Guest Authentication

Guest authentication enables you to access certain Twitter API resources without requiring users to log in with Twitter first. It is limited to API requests that do not require a user context. This means, for example, that you cannot Tweet with guest authentication. You can get a user’s timeline of public Tweets. See Access Twitter’s REST API.

Guest authentication is an extension to application authentication and as such, the permission scope and rate limits are the same as application authentication. There are however two major differences:

1. rate limits will scale with the number of users of your application
2. guest auth tokens have a time expiration

To obtain a guest token for your user, you can use the following method:

import com.twitter.sdk.android.core.AppSession;
import com.twitter.sdk.android.core.Callback;
import com.twitter.sdk.android.core.Result;
import com.twitter.sdk.android.core.TwitterCore;
import com.twitter.sdk.android.core.TwitterException;
...

TwitterCore.getInstance().logInGuest(new Callback() {
   @Override
    public void success(Result result) {
        AppSession guestAppSession = result.data;
    }

    @Override
    public void failure(TwitterException exception) {
        // unable to get an AppSession with guest auth
    }
});

Handle token expirations which can occur when making requests with guest authentication.

TwitterApiClient twitterApiClient =  TwitterCore.getInstance().getApiClient(guestAppSession);
twitterApiClient.getSearchService().tweets("#fabric", null, null, null, null, 50, null, null, null, true, new Callback() {
    @Override
    public void success(Result result) {
        // use result tweets
    }

    @Override
    public void failure(TwitterException exception) {
        final TwitterApiException apiException = (TwitterApiException) exception;
        final int errorCode = apiException.getErrorCode();
        if (errorCode == TwitterApiConstants.Errors.APP_AUTH_ERROR_CODE || errorCode == TwitterApiConstants.Errors.GUEST_AUTH_ERROR_CODE) {
            // get new guestAppSession
            // optionally retry
        }
    }
});

Finally, if you are using the TweetUtils.loadTweet or TweetUtils.loadTweets helpers from the TweetUi kit of the Twitter kit group, setting up guest authentication and handling expiration is performed automatically.