State / merkle tree visualizer

[moul]

I remember such amazing tools developed in the IPFS ecosystem to visualize merkle trees and CIDs in general. It was both useful for educational purpose but also for debugging.

Feel free to share existing projects that we could potentially adapt for our case.

Personally, I’d love something working in CLIs.

[moul]

Cc @ajnavarro

[ajnavarro]

@moul I think you might be referring to https://dag.ipfs.tech/ , right?

I love CLIs too, and the best Merkle tree visualizer I know is the git log command:

Also, Merkle trees can be represented in a lot of different ways, ones are better for specific use cases. What do we want to show on that Merkle tree representation?

[moul]

Not sure, but maybe visualizing the state evolution at the end of execution or through an indexer could greatly aid in contract debugging and discovering new usages.

[moul]

cc @ilgooz do you have something similar in mind for Gno Studio?

[ajnavarro]

Maybe a crazy idea, but we can represent the realm states as a table and make queries filling a lot of different use cases:

These are some of the possible tables that we can have:

Functions Table

Field Name	Type	Value Example
package	string	gno.land/r/my/package
height	number	23
name	string	Render
params	json	{"name":"Render", "type":"string"}
results	json	{"name": "_", "type": "string"}

State Table

Field Name	Type	Value Example
package	string	gno.land/r/my/package
height	number	23
var_name	string	gBoards
var_type	string	avl.Tree
var_id	string	7f83b1657ff1fc53b92dc18148a1daddd200126d9069:21
value	blob	[Content of the variable if any]
refs_names	json	["var.name"]
refs_ids	json	["7f83b1657ff1fc53b92dc18148a1d65dfc2d4b1:43"]

Query examples

Get last state for a specific var

SELECT 
    package, 
    value 
FROM 
    states 
WHERE 
    package='this.is/r/my/realm' and 
    height=last_height() and 
    var_name='avl.Tree';

Get all the states of a variable

SELECT 
    package, 
    value 
FROM 
    states 
WHERE 
    package='this.is/r/my/realm' and 
    var_name='avl.Tree';

Compare last two states of a variable

SELECT 
    value as 'previous',
    (
        SELECT 
            value 
        FROM 
            states 
        WHERE 
            package='this.is/r/my/realm' and 
            height=last_height() and 
            var_name='avl.Tree'
    ) as 'actual'
FROM 
    states 
WHERE 
    package='this.is/r/my/realm' and 
    height=last_height()-1 and 
    var_name='avl.Tree';

List all functions from a specific package

SELECT 
    name 
FROM 
    functions 
WHERE 
    package='this.is/r/my/realm' and 
    height=last_height();

Get all packages using the Render function

SELECT 
    package 
FROM 
    functions 
WHERE 
    name='Render' and 
    JSON_LENGTH(params) == 1 and 
    JSON_LENGTH(results) == 1 and
    height=last_height();