Consuming Twitter Search ATOM With Linq -- And Watch Out For Caching!

So you want to know what is happening right now. Twitter Search is the way. Constructing a query and parsing the ATOM is pretty easy.

Recently hit a gotcha where the network my app was running was caching the results.  The way to override was to create a WebClient and set the cache policy explicitly.  You can see how that works by setting the RequestCacheLevel to NoCacheNoStore. Then, call OpenRead() on the WebClient.

After that, I use Linq to parse the results. One gotcha is the need to explicitly add the namespace when querying the results.  (If there is a better way, let me know!)

Here's the code.

string xml;
string term = "mix09"; 
using (WebClient webclient = new WebClient())
{
    RequestCachePolicy policy = new RequestCachePolicy(RequestCacheLevel.NoCacheNoStore);
    webclient.CachePolicy = policy;
    Stream stream = webclient.OpenRead
         (string.Format("http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q={0}", term));
    StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(stream);
    xml = sr.ReadToEnd();
    sr.Close();
}
XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse(xml);
XNamespace xmlns = "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";
var tweet = from entry in doc.Descendants(xmlns + "entry")
            select new
            {
                Content = entry.Element(xmlns + "title").Value,
                Date = entry.Element(xmlns + "published").Value,
                Author = entry.Element(xmlns + "author").Element(xmlns + "uri").Value.Replace("http://twitter.com/", ""),
                Image = entry.Elements(xmlns + "link").ElementAt(1).Attribute("href").Value

            };
foreach (var c in tweet)
{

//do something here...
}

Note this code is used in Flotzam!