![\"image\"](\"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/image18.png\" "\\"image\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nI thought this would be easy, but encountered several problems. I am developing in XAML and C#; this aspect would probably be easier in HTML.<\/p>\n
The first problem: retrieving the tweets. The Twitter REST API version 1.1 has GET statuses\/user_timeline<\/a> which does what I want, except that it requires \u201cuser context\u201d, in other words a Twitter log-in. That is an unacceptable requirement for a user simply viewing my tweets, rather than their own timeline. <\/p>\n The deprecated Twitter RSS API<\/a> on the other hand is perfect. Unfortunately:<\/p>\n Please note that there is no support for the RSS response format in API v1.1. Properly versioned API v1 URLs will cease functioning in March 2013<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Never mind, it will do for the moment. I created a Twitter data source which retrieves the tweets as RSS. In my XAML I have a ListView which is bound to this data source. This ListView has an ItemTemplate which defines what appears in the list. I added a TweetItemTemplate in the Resources section of the XAML which displays each tweet in a TextBlock. So far so good.<\/p>\n No hyperlinks though \u2013 they are dead. What is the use of a tweet without hyperlinks? Not much. I thought of a hack which would let you click or tap an entire tweet, look to see if a hyperlink is there, and then launch it. Ugly, and would only work for one hyperlink per tweet.<\/p>\n TextBlock does not support hyperlinks. However there is a way to do this using RichTextBlock. This supports a collection of inline elements. You can have a Run element containing text, then an InlineUIContainer containing a HyperLinkButton, then another Run element and so on. The Hyperlink will be out of alignment, as shown here<\/a>, but you can fix that by tweaking margins and padding.<\/p>\n Of course, this approach does mean parsing the tweet to extract the URLs and then building the RichTextBlock content. So in place of my simple TextBlock binding I now have this:<\/p>\n <ContentControl Content="{Binding Path=Title,Converter={StaticResource tweetToBlocks}}"><\/ContentControl><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I have also written a converter class which takes the bound value, builds the RichTextBlock in C#, and returns it. This gets you the result in the first image in this post. Not too bad, and the links work.<\/p>\n What is annoying though is that the mouse pointer does not change to a hand icon when you hover over the link. I thought I could fix this by subclassing HyperLinkButton and adding code to change the cursor on the PointerEntered event:<\/p>\n Window.Current.CoreWindow.PointerCursor = new Windows.UI.Core.CoreCursor(Windows.UI.Core.CoreCursorType.Hand, 1);<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This does not work. At least, you can see a flash as the cursor tries to change, but it is overridden by the RichTextBlock which changes it back to a text select cursor. I have not found a way round this yet.<\/p>\n I then tried another approach. You can use a RichEditBox which does<\/strong> support links. The approach is different; you set the text of the Document property and then use the Link method to assign a link to a TextRange within it. It works; but I was frustrated to find that the mouse pointer still does not change to a hand when over the link. The RichTextBlock actually works just as well and is more integrated with XAML.<\/p>\n I am sure you could fix this by using a WebView \u2013 embedded IE \u2013 for each tweet, but that seems to me an unduly heavyweight approach. Better perhaps would be a single web view showing all the tweets, which I might try when I have a moment.<\/p>\n Even so, I was surprised how tricky it is to show tweets with hyperlinks in a ListView.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been messing around with a Windows 8 app to present content from ITWriting.com in an app, mainly as a learning exercise. I came up with the idea of showing recent tweets on the main page of the app. Like this: I thought this would be easy, but encountered several problems. I am developing … Continue reading Hands on Windows 8 development: Twitter and hyperlink hassles<\/span> \n
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