Alternate infrastructure for testing event filters

[pipermerriam]

What was wrong?

Testing event filters sucks. Either we depend on eth-tester which probably/maybe implements the filter logic correctly, or we use geth which results in flaky tests and the bad kind of black-box testing since when things fail we don't really have any good way to know why...

How can it be fixed?

I recently wrote this: https://github.com/ethereum/cthaeh

The most relevant parts are:

• The SQLAlchemy ORM models:
  • https://github.com/ethereum/cthaeh/blob/a3f63b0522d940af37f485ccbeed07666adb465b/cthaeh/models.py
• The filtering logic:
  • https://github.com/ethereum/cthaeh/blob/a3f63b0522d940af37f485ccbeed07666adb465b/cthaeh/filter.py

If we were to extract these two bits plus some other support code into something stand-alone that is more like a library then we should be able to use this for testing our log filter code.

[pipermerriam]

Explicitely what I think is needed is:

• orm models
• filter querying API
• ir representation (https://github.com/ethereum/cthaeh/blob/a3f63b0522d940af37f485ccbeed07666adb465b/cthaeh/ir.py)
• something to make it easy to load up an in-memory database declaratively/concisely

Then in our tests we can use a middleware to intercept JSON-RPC filter requests and serve them using the core library API.

[wolovim]

is sqlite what you had in mind?

import sqlite3
conn = sqlite3.connect(':memory:')

update: we chatted, am spiking on it.