Unable to reply to tweet

[TamcappConf]

Hi,
I am trying to reply to a tweet with an ‘inline’ reply.
Whatever I try, the in_reply_to_status_id in the response always returns null.

I have the following jscode:

var reply = '@' + userId + ' : ' + message;
params = {
            status: reply,
            in_reply_to_status_id_str: reply_to_tweet_id_str,
            in_reply_to_status_id: reply_to_tweet_id};

        T.post('statuses/update', params, function (err, response) { ..........

The response contains (even if I hardcode the in_reply_to_status_id(_str) to the value of the id to reflect an existing tweet of the user I am mentioning):

 in_reply_to_status_id: null,
  in_reply_to_status_id_str: null,
  in_reply_to_user_id: 1039444691199172600,
  in_reply_to_user_id_str: '1039444691199172608',
  in_reply_to_screen_name: 'myresearchuser1',

What goes wrong?

Thanks

[johnd]

Hi @TamcappConf,

If you’re not using the auto_populate_reply_metadata=true param, you’ll need to include @username, where username (not user id) is the author of the referenced Tweet, within the status update. This is documented here.

Here’s a valid twurl call for reference:

twurl -d 'status=@username reply&in_reply_to_status_id=<tweetID>' /1.1/statuses/update.json

Hope this helps!

[andypiper]

One more thing to note, beyond @johnd’s clarification above - since you are using Javascript, you should always use the string representation of the ID values. As you will see in your own example, the in_reply_to_user_id and in_reply_to_user_id_str values are showing up differently. This is due to the technical limitations of Javascript in handling large integer values (read more here). You also do not need to pass both values in to the call anyway, only one is optionally needed.

So, I would recommend that you change your code to

params = {
            status: reply,
            in_reply_to_status_id: reply_to_tweet_id_str};

[TamcappConf]

Thanks guys. Works perfect now.

[andypiper]