Spring Social LinkedIn Reference Manual

Spring Social's ConnectController works with one or more provider-specific ConnectionFactorys to exchange authorization details with the provider and to create connections. Spring Social LinkedIn provides LinkedInConnectionFactory, a ConnectionFactory for creating connections with LinkedIn.

So that ConnectController can find LinkedInConnectionFactory, it must be registered with a ConnectionFactoryRegistry. The following class constructs a ConnectionFactoryRegistry containing a ConnectionFactory for LinkedIn using Spring's Java configuration style:

@Configuration
public class SocialConfig {
	
    @Bean
    public ConnectionFactoryLocator connectionFactoryLocator() {
        ConnectionFactoryRegistry registry = new ConnectionFactoryRegistry();
        registry.addConnectionFactory(new LinkedInConnectionFactory(
            environment.getProperty("linkedin.consumerKey"),
            environment.getProperty("linkedin.consumerSecret")));
        return registry;
    }

}

	

Here, a LinkedIn connection factory is registered with ConnectionFactoryRegistry via the addConnectionFactory() method. If we wanted to add support for connecting to other providers, we would simply register their connection factories here in the same way as LinkedInConnectionFactory.

Because consumer keys and secrets may be different across environments (e.g., test, production, etc) it is recommended that these values be externalized. As shown here, Spring 3.1's Environment is used to look up the application's consumer key and secret.

Optionally, you may also configure ConnectionFactoryRegistry and LinkedInConnectionFactory in XML:

<bean id="connectionFactoryLocator" class="org.springframework.social.connect.support.ConnectionFactoryRegistry">
    <property name="connectionFactories">
        <list>
            <bean class="org.springframework.social.linkedin.connect.LinkedInConnectionFactory">
                <constructor-arg value="${linkedin.consumerKey}" />
                <constructor-arg value="${linkedin.consumerSecret}" />				
            </bean>
        </list>
    </property>
</bean>
	

This is functionally equivalent to the Java-based configuration of ConnectionFactoryRegistry shown before. The only casual difference is that the connection factories are injected as a list into the connectionFactories property rather than with the addConnectionFactory() method. As in the Java-based configuration, the application's consumer key and secret are externalized (shown here as property placeholders).

Refer to Spring Social's reference documentation for complete details on configuring ConnectController and its dependencies.

Spring Social LinkedIn offers integration with LinkedIn's REST API with the LinkedIn interface and its implementation, LinkedInTemplate.

To create an instance of LinkedInTemplate, you may pass in your application's OAuth 1 credentials, along with an access token/secret pair to the constructor:

String consumerKey = "..."; // The application's consumer key
String consumerSecret = "..."; // The application's consumer secret
String accessToken = "..."; // The access token granted after OAuth authorization
String accessTokenSecret = "..."; // The access token secret granted after OAuth authorization
LinkedIn linkedin = new LinkedInTemplate(consumerKey, consumerSecret, accessToken, accessTokenSecret);
	

If you are using Spring Social's service provider framework, you can get an instance of LinkedIn from a Connection. For example, the following snippet calls getApi() on a connection to retrieve a LinkedIn:

Connection<LinkedIn> connection = connectionRepository.findPrimaryConnection(LinkedIn.class);
if (connection != null) {
    LinkedIn linkedin = connection.getApi();

    // ... use LinkedIn API binding
}
	

Here, ConnectionRepository is being asked for the primary connection that the current user has with LinkedIn. If a connection to LinkedIn is found, it retrieves a LinkedIn instance that is configured with the connection details received when the connection was first established.

Once you have a LinkedIn you can use it to interact with LinkedIn on behalf of the user who the access token was granted for.

LinkedInProfile profile = linkedin.getUserProfile();
		

String profileId = linkedin.getProfileId();
		

String profileUrl = linkedin.getProfileUrl();
		

List<LinkedInProfile> connections = linkedin.getConnections();