Getting all mentions of a @user twitter api

Question

I have a scenario in my django project where I need to retrieve all mentions of a specific twitter user. I have the credentials of the user. I have tried the search api which did not provide enough, I could not pull all mentions and also the limit set by twitter was hindering what I seek.

So, now I seek advice whether this can be achieved by the Streaming api or not? I also need to store the retrieved tweet details in my mongodb database so that I can run filter and custom searches. I am using twython package for this.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if you are trying to retrieve it from the authenticated user or not, but if you are this is what I came up with. Not sure if it's the best way or not though.

m = twitter.get_mentions_timeline(count=200)
    calls = 1
    id = m[-1]['id']
    next_id = -1

    # will continue calling mentions timeline until you hit rate limit
    # or there are no more mentions of authenticated user
    while id != next_id and calls < 16:
        temp = twitter.get_mentions_timeline(count=200,max_id=id)
        calls += 1
        next_id = temp[-1]['id']
        if id != next_id:
            m += temp
            next_id = -1
            id = temp[-1]['id']

m will be an array of all retrieved mentions of the authenticated user.