Accessing the properties of an IEnumerable

I'm using TweetInvi to grab a bunch of tweets that match a specified hashtag. I do this with the following:

var matchingTweets = Search.SearchTweets(hashtag);

This returns an IEnumerable (named ITweet, interface of Tweet), however I cannot create a List<> of Tweets, because Tweet is a static type.

I made, instead, a list of objects, using:

List<object> matches = matchingTweets.Cast<object>().ToList();

However, although each member of the matchingTweets IEnumerable has a number of properties, I cannot access them using:

long tweetID = matches[i].<property>;

Using matches[i].ToString() returns the tweet content, so how can I effectively cast the results in matchingTweets to a list, and subsequently access the properties of those list members? I would ideally like to avoid using dynamic.

Solution

In your example above you were trying to grab the ID from the tweet. ITweet implements ITweetIdentifier which contains the Id property. You can literally just access it by:

var matchingTweets = Search.SearchTweets(hashtag);

//Grab the first 5 tweets from the results.
var firstFiveTweets = matchingTweets.Take(5).ToList();

//if you only want the ids and not the entire object
var firstFiveTweetIds = matchingTweets.Take(5).Select(t => t.Id).ToList();

//Iterate through and do stuff
foreach (var tweet in matchingTweets)
{
    //These are just examples of the properties accessible to you...
    if(tweet.Favorited)
    {
        var text = tweet.FullText;
    }     
    if(tweet.RetweetCount > 100)
    {
        //TODO: Handle popular tweets...
    }   
}

//Get item at specific index
matchingTweets.ElementAt(index);

I don't know exactly what you want to do with all the info, but since the SearchTweets returns a IEnumerable of ITweets you have access to anything an ITweet has defined.

I highly recommend looking through their wiki. It's pretty well organized and gives you clear examples of some basic tasks.