Question

I am designing a website and it uses Windows Forms (in Visual Studio 10) in which for example i have five-six URLs. Now i am displaying them on home page of my website xyz.com

What i want is, i want to calculate total no. of tweets for all links and display links based on no. of times they are being tweeted/retweeted.

for a url we can calculate no. of tweet using twitter api http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=YourURL

I know all the stuff like receiving JSON values in a string and parsing json to retrieve tweet counts and then compare and display links based on the priority etc.

What i have been using till now it is initiating all the process using a Click_Button.

But i want to know how can i automate this all for each 10 minutes. Its like a end user can see urls priority with just refreshing the page.

Answer 1

If timing itself is not important (it doesn’t have to be 10 minutes precisely), I would suggest binding to any event that fires when users use your application. No point in calculating anything if noone is using it 🙂

So you could use a login, or page load, or whatever happens at an interval roughly like the interval you wish to achieve.

You can always store a DateTime variable somewhere that you can check to see when the calculation was last made. Something like:

public void MyEventHasFired()
{
     DateTime dateLastProcessed = ... //Database? Session data? Anything goes.
     if(dateLastProcessed < DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(-10))
     {
          //calculate

          ...

          dateLastProcessed = DateTime.Now;
     }
}