For this you should use either Arrays or ArrayLists (if the number of items is changed a lot).

Right, I get that part on principle but not execution.  I think I'm just forgetting something really basic, but would it be something like this?

1. Arraylist<FilterQuery> fqList = new ArrayList<FilterQuery>;
   
2. 
   
3. if(eventOccurs == true){   
4.       fqList.add(new FilterQuery());   // would it be fqList.add(new FilterQuery fq);?
   
5.       for (int i = fqList.size()){
   
6.             fq(i).follow;
7.             }
   
8.       eventOccurs = false;
9. }

where can i explicitly call out and the name (fq)?

Read the help for arrayList. http://processing.org/learning/topics/arraylistclass.html

ok, i think i see what I'm doing wrong here.  I only want to run the methods on the last position of the arraylist, so I have changed it to hopefully do that instead of using a for loop to go through all positions.  Looks like it is working, I think, although the overall program still refuses to do what I want.

1. Arraylist<FilterQuery> fqList = new ArrayList<FilterQuery>();
   
2. 
   
3. if(eventOccurs == true){   
4.       fqList.add(new FilterQuery());  
   
5.       FilterQuery fqTemp = (FilterQuery)fqList.get((fqList.size()-1));
6.       fqTemp.follow
7.       fqTemp.track
   
8. 
   
9.       eventOccurs = false;
10. }

Line 3

Thanks for the responses Chrisir,

so if my boolean "EventOccurs" is made true earlier I dont need to state "== true"?  I could just say
      if(EventOccurs){  ?

Got rid of the (FilterQuery).  I had seen it done like that somewhere else, and am just getting a handle on casting objects and the correct ways to declare things like arraylists.


What do you mean when you say "followed"?  I am not actually sure if I need an arraylist in the long run, but I can't get my FilterQuery to update correctly so I tried it this way.  If you are curious, a (slightly earlier) version of my full code is located here:

https://forum.processing.org/topic/questions-about-streaming-twitter4j-api

what we have been talking about starts at void draw().  I hadn't added an arraylist yet.

Thanks

got it all working now.  On to the next problem!

I now want to be able to organize all the tweets coming in and break them down by the time they arrived.  So, for example, all tweets that arrive in the 1st minute get grouped together, all tweets in the second minute get grouped together, and so on for n minutes until I stop running the program.

I have collected the tweets into "tweetObj" objects and have determined at what time since starting the program they were created.  The "tweetObj" objects are currently all added into an arraylist.

So I imagine what I need is an arraylist of arrayslists that adds a new position every time a certain time interval occurs and then any objects that get made with a variable that matches that time interval gets added into the arraylist at that position.  That sounds simple enough, but im stuck on making a new arraylist position at a specific time interval.

You can stick to One arraylist and just Save the Time in TweetObj.