Meteor.http.get issue with Twitter API - api

Question

I am using Meteor and the Twitter API for a project. I want to get information on a user from Twitter. I wrote a function that for example returns only the location of a user from Twitter. I believe this is the proper way to do a request on Meteor. Here it is :
Meteor.methods({getTwitterLocation: function (username) {
Meteor.http.get("https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name="+ username +"&include_entities=true", function(error, result) {
if (result.statusCode === 200) {
var respJson = JSON.parse(result.content);
console.log(respJson.location);
console.log("location works");
return (respJson.location)
}else {
return ( "Unknown user ")
}
});
}});
Now this function will log what's in the console on my Git Bash. I get someones Location by doing a Meteor.call. But I want to post what that function returns on a page. In my case, I want to post in on a user's profile. This doesn't work. But the console.log(respJson.location) returns the location in my Git Bash but it won't display anything on the profile page. This is what I did on my profile page:
profile.js :
Template.profile.getLocation= function(){
return Meteor.call("getTwitterLocation","BillGates");
}
profile.html :
<template name="profile">
from {{getLocation}}
</template>
With that I get "Seattle, WA" and " "location works" on my Git Bash but nothing on the profile page. If anyone knows what I can do, that'd be really appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Firstly when data is returned from the server you need to use a synchronous call, as the callback will return the data when the server already thinks the meteor method has completed. (the callback will be fired at a later time, when the data is returned from the server, by which time the meteor client would have already got a response)
var result = Meteor.http.get("https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name="+ username +"&include_entities=true");
if (result.statusCode === 200) {
var respJson = JSON.parse(result.content);
console.log(respJson.location);
console.log("location works");
return (respJson.location)
}else {
return ( "Unknown user ")
}
The second is you need to use a Session hash to return the data from the template. This is because it will take time to get the response and the getLocation would expect an instant result (without a callback). At the moment client side javascript can't use synchronous api calls like on the server.
Template.profile.getLocation= function(){
return Session.get("twitterlocation");
}
Use the template created event to fire the meteor call:
Template.profile.created = function() {
Meteor.call("getTwitterLocation","BillGates", function(err,result) {
if(result && !err) {
Session.set("twitterlocation", result);
}
else
{
Session.set("twitterlocation", "Error");
}
});
});
Update:
Twitter has since updated its API to 1.1 a few modifications are required:
You now need to swap over to the 1.1 api by using 1.1 instead of 1. In addition you need to OAuth your requests. See https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/authorizing-request. Below contains sample data but you need to get proper keys
var authkey = "OAuth oauth_consumer_key="xvz1evFS4wEEPTGEFPHBog",
oauth_nonce="kYjzVBB8Y0ZFabxSWbWovY3uYSQ2pTgmZeNu2VS4cg",
oauth_signature="tnnArxj06cWHq44gCs1OSKk%2FjLY%3D",
oauth_signature_method="HMAC-SHA1",
oauth_timestamp=""+(new Date().getTime()/1000).toFixed(0)+"",
oauth_token="370773112-GmHxMAgYyLbNEtIKZeRNFsMKPR9EyMZeS9weJAEb",
oauth_version="1.0"";
Be sure to remove the newlines, I've wrapped it to make it easy to read.
var result = Meteor.http.get("https://api.twitter.com/1.1/users/show.json?screen_name="+ username +"&include_entities=true",{headers:{Authorization : authkey});
If you find this a bit troublesome it might be easier to just use a package like https://github.com/Sewdn/meteor-twitter-api via meteorite to OAuth your requests for you.