[RPC] Transaction details in getblock

achow101 commented at 2:08 am on September 12, 2016: member

Adds an optional parameter extraVerbose to getblock to have transaction details displayed in a getblock call.

fanquake added the label RPC/REST/ZMQ on Sep 12, 2016

dcousens commented at 3:10 am on September 12, 2016: contributor

concept NACK, is two RPC requests really so bad?

edit: weak concept NACK

achow101 commented at 3:25 am on September 12, 2016: member

@dcousens yes, two RPC calls is really bad, especially when you want the details of all the transactions in a block. Then you end up running getrawtransaction thousands of times. Also, AFAICT, this doesn’t require the txindex in order to get the transactions, unlike getrawtransaction.

dcousens commented at 3:50 am on September 12, 2016: contributor

@dcousens yes, two RPC calls is really bad

Why? If you’re following best practices (RPC is over localhost only) in terms of access, the latency should be irrelevant.

In a batched RPC call, the overhead is literally just 1RTT more. Not N (aka, thousands), 1.

AFAICT, this doesn’t require the txindex in order to get the transactions, unlike getrawtransaction.

Perhaps getrawtransaction should have an optional block parameter?

edit: In fact, adding that option would be significantly more useful than this RTT optimisation IMHO.

achow101 commented at 4:05 am on September 12, 2016: member

In a batched RPC call, the overhead is literally just 1RTT more. Not N (aka, thousands), 1.

How?

edit: In fact, adding that option would be significantly more useful than this RTT optimisation IMHO.

Well the functionality to this was already in the code. The BlockToJson method took a parameter for txDetails which was by default false. This just lets you set that to true.

dcousens commented at 4:11 am on September 12, 2016: contributor

http://www.jsonrpc.org/specification#batch

What language are you using? Your RPC library should be able to handle this quite easily.

achow101 commented at 4:27 am on September 12, 2016: member

Huh. Didn’t know that. I’ve been using bash with either curl or bitcoin-cli and python.

laanwj commented at 3:33 pm on September 13, 2016: member

Saving roundtrip time is not a valid reason to add a RPC API (see discussion in #8457).

Also, AFAICT, this doesn’t require the txindex in order to get the transactions, unlike getrawtransaction.

This is the only important fact here: you cannot get this information any other way. getrawtransaction won’t get you transactions in blocks, at least without tx index.

The only way to get this information right now is to getblock raw then parse the block locally.

So concept ACK because of that.

dcousens commented at 9:54 pm on September 13, 2016: contributor

@laanwj would it maybe be better to add functionality via getrawtransaction w/ a block id? (perhaps in addition to this)

laanwj commented at 9:24 am on September 14, 2016: member

would it maybe be better to add functionality via getrawtransaction w/ a block id? (perhaps in addition to this)

Well yes a “gather transaction [X,…] from prespecified block Y” RPC call could be useful in some rare cases. But on the other hand it’ll still have to read the entire block from disk and deserialize it. It’s terribly inefficient already. So if it decoded the entire block why not report details for the entire block as done here?

dcousens commented at 12:06 pm on September 14, 2016: contributor

@laanwj indeed! Forgot about the resulting deserialization.

luke-jr commented at 4:14 am on September 22, 2016: member

Concept ACK for all the reasons @laanwj already discussed.

in src/rpc/blockchain.cpp: in 0115d18b82 outdated

688@@ -689,11 +689,12 @@ UniValue getblockheader(const UniValue& params, bool fHelp)
689 
690 UniValue getblock(const UniValue& params, bool fHelp)
691 {
692-    if (fHelp || params.size() < 1 || params.size() > 2)
693+    if (fHelp || params.size() < 1 || params.size() > 3)
694         throw runtime_error(
695-            "getblock \"hash\" ( verbose )\n"
696+            "getblock \"hash\" ( verbose ) ( extraVerbose )\n"

luke-jr commented at 8:42 am on October 18, 2016:

Double boolean here seems ugly. Maybe allow verbose to be boolean or a number 0-2 (with 2 being extraVerbose)?

laanwj commented at 9:10 am on October 18, 2016:

It is ugly, but overloading on type in JSON which is essentially dynamically typed is also ugly.

Named parameters as implemented in #8811 would make this more bearable.

laanwj commented at 9:15 am on October 18, 2016:

I do agree that for a new interface, a scale for verbosity would have made more sense instead of a boolean. Maybe that’s a better choice I’m just not sure. Changing the meaning of existing arguments is always annoying and means extra testing for backwards compatibility.

laanwj commented at 11:33 am on October 26, 2016: member

I’m starting to realize that @luke-jr’s idea to accept 0-2 isn’t such a bad idea after all. Just rename the argument ‘verbosityLevel’. It is easier to use and understand from a user perspective than two booleans (we regularly get confused there in the tests ourselves). Also it’d remove having to deal with the redundant and nonsensical combo verbose=false extraVerbose=true.

It should still accept false and true too. For consistency we should do the same in getrawtransaction. This method currently accepts a verbose argument that can be 0 or 1 but not false or true. The mapping false:0,true:1 should be added there (not in this pull though).

Also: needs rebase.

achow101 commented at 3:03 pm on October 26, 2016: member

How should it document in the help message that the old behavior is still accepted?

achow101 force-pushed on Oct 26, 2016

achow101 commented at 3:29 pm on October 26, 2016: member

Rebased and made verbose an int from 0-2

luke-jr commented at 5:32 am on November 24, 2016: member

@achow101 The old behaviour should be considered deprecated, and therefore not documented.

in src/rpc/blockchain.cpp: in ad8fc81cde outdated

701+            "The previous behavior of verbose being a boolean is still maintained. False will have the behavior of 0 and True will have the behavior of 1.\n"
702             "\nArguments:\n"
703             "1. \"hash\"          (string, required) The block hash\n"
704-            "2. verbose           (boolean, optional, default=true) true for a json object, false for the hex encoded data\n"
705-            "\nResult (for verbose = true):\n"
706+            "2. verbose           (boolean, optional, default=1) 0 for hex encoded data, 1 for a json object, and 2 for json object with transaction data\n"

luke-jr commented at 5:33 am on November 24, 2016:

Should be renamed to verbosity.

achow101 force-pushed on Nov 24, 2016

achow101 commented at 5:47 am on November 24, 2016: member

@luke-jr done

luke-jr referenced this in commit 645b21cff4 on Dec 21, 2016

achow101 commented at 0:50 am on January 10, 2017: member

merge please?

luke-jr approved

luke-jr commented at 4:00 pm on February 3, 2017: member

utACK

luke-jr commented at 4:00 pm on February 3, 2017: member

(Needs rebase)

achow101 force-pushed on Feb 3, 2017

achow101 commented at 4:26 pm on February 3, 2017: member

rebased

luke-jr approved

pstratem commented at 0:06 am on February 15, 2017: contributor

Is this compatible with callers of getblock which send true instead of 0/1 ?

achow101 commented at 0:39 am on February 15, 2017: member

@pstratem Yes. The old style of calling is maintained for compatibility.

in src/rpc/blockchain.cpp: in 9ada7f04c8 outdated

735+            "  \"weight\" : n           (numeric) The block weight (BIP 141)\n"
736+            "  \"height\" : n,          (numeric) The block height or index\n"
737+            "  \"version\" : n,         (numeric) The block version\n"
738+            "  \"versionHex\" : \"00000000\", (string) The block version formatted in hexadecimal\n"
739+            "  \"merkleroot\" : \"xxxx\", (string) The merkle root\n"
740+            "  \"tx\" : [               (array of Objects) The transactions\n"

jnewbery commented at 11:04 pm on February 15, 2017:

I’d suggest not including this in the help output, and just having something like:

0           "  \"tx\" : [               (array of Objects) The transactions. Format is the same as for getrawtransaction call\n"
1           "         ,...\n"
2           "  ],\n"

If the output format of TxToJSON() ever changes, I’m sure that changing this help text will be forgotten!

sipa commented at 3:29 pm on April 9, 2017: member

Needs rebase.

RPC: Allow multiple names for parameters c99ab3ca4b

achow101 force-pushed on Apr 10, 2017

achow101 commented at 1:30 pm on April 10, 2017: member

rebased. also added @jnewbery’s suggestion with the help text.

luke-jr referenced this in commit ae106ec2b8 on Apr 21, 2017

kallewoof commented at 1:09 am on May 12, 2017: member

utACK b779f3093d7b68ee09305a5294c48825dce8ae1f

Use a verbosity instead of two verbose parameters

Verbose is changed to an int. This can have values from 0-2 for each level of verbosity.
Verbosity level 2 has transaction details displayed in the results.

e3c9f2ddb1

in src/rpc/blockchain.cpp:722 in b779f3093d outdated

718@@ -716,8 +719,29 @@ UniValue getblock(const JSONRPCRequest& request)
719             "  \"previousblockhash\" : \"hash\",  (string) The hash of the previous block\n"
720             "  \"nextblockhash\" : \"hash\"       (string) The hash of the next block\n"
721             "}\n"
722-            "\nResult (for verbose=false):\n"
723-            "\"data\"             (string) A string that is serialized, hex-encoded data for block 'hash'.\n"
724+            "\nResult (for verbosity = 2):\n"

paveljanik commented at 6:39 am on May 12, 2017:

What about mentioning only the differences to verbosity=1 instead?

achow101 commented at 3:47 pm on May 12, 2017:

something like this?

0{
1..., Same as for verbosity=1
2"tx" : [           (array of Objects) The transactions in the format of the getrawtransaction RPC.
3         , ...
4],
5... Same as for verbosity=1
6}

paveljanik commented at 3:50 pm on May 12, 2017:

Yup, or maybe even better:

0Additional output (for verbosity=1):...

achow101 force-pushed on May 12, 2017

achow101 commented at 3:59 pm on May 12, 2017: member

@paveljanik I made the change.

laanwj commented at 3:20 pm on May 15, 2017: member

Tested ACK e3c9f2d

laanwj merged this on May 15, 2017

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[RPC] Transaction details in getblock #8704