Visualizing parent chain, confirmations

[ey51]

This issue is dependent on completion of kaspanet/kasparov#44 (comment)

Current State

Currently blue, red and parent chain blocks are not visualized.

Proposed change

• Confirmations obtained in the block object in the responses of API calls are correct up to the time of the response. After that, they need to be re-calculated each time there is a new selected-tip block.

  • The calculation is:
    block.confirmations = dag.selected_tip.blue_score - block.accepting_block.blue_score + 1
  • The block's accepting block is part of the chain formed by the selected-tips, and its hash is a field inside the block the confirmations are being calculated for.
  • New selected-tips are received in the mqtt dag/selected-tip
  • We are adding an mqtt topic for diffs in the dag/selected-parent-chain. It will contain two arrays, blocks removed from the dag/selected-parent-chain and blocks added to the dag/selected-parent-chain. After we add that, you can use that topic instead of the dag/selected-tip topic.

• Blocks with block.confirmations=0 --- they can have no color.

• Blocks with block.confirmations>0 --- they can be colored greener the more confirmations they have.

  • the larger the confirmations the "greener" (4 levels . 1-5 confirmations (configurable): 25%; 6-20: 50%; 21-50: 75%; 51+:100%)

• Selected Parent Chain Blocks are blue blocks with isParentChain=true --- they can have a thicker border to signify part of the selected parent chain.

[ey51]

Selected Parent Chain - the bold links are better, the green color and dashed lines pattern are nice. Please also add the same bold line to the blocks' border.

[ey51]

Confirmations - need to provide the dag/selected-parent-chain topic before you can calculate them for blocks.

[ey51]

Update:

• Visualizing the Selected Parent Chain (SPC) is completed.
• Visualizing Block Confirmations:
  • The dag/selected-parent-chain mqtt topic is available. From it you get updates to the SPC and the DAG Selected Tip.
  • From here, confirmations can be calculated, as described above:
    block.confirmations = dag.selected_tip.blue_score - block.accepting_block.blue_score + 1
    Note: for the selected tip, you do not need the mqtt dag/selected-tip topic. You simply use the block with the largest blue score received from mqtt dag/selected-parent-chain topic.
  • Visualizing the Block Confirmations:
    • For now, let's just recalculate the confirmations correctly. We need to find a good way to visualize it without overburdening the UI too much, as there are already many visual elements.

[ey51]

Closing this. For block confirmations issue see #13