Provide a feature to specify block finality time

[DoubleOTheven]

instant finality makes front end development difficult, and unrealistic. It would be great to be able to simulate the various states of a transaction in block, finalized, etc

[wottpal]

Hey, did you found a solution, @DoubleOTheven?

I'm facing a similar problem right now. Not only from the perspective that frontend development is more artificial then (no loading states etc.), but I also have the problem that polkadot.js/api transactions never yield an isFinalized state (isInBlock is always the latest) which I think is caused by the instant finality since #42.

Small example:

await tx.signAndSend(account, (result) => {
      const isInBlock = result?.status?.isInBlock    // works on all nodes
      const isFinalized = result?.status?.isFinalized  // never `true` on `substrate-contracts-node` but on all others
})

Any ideas @cmichi @jacogr? Do I miss something?

[athei]

I think we should just move to a very short block time (<< 1s) instead of having instant finality.

[wottpal]

I think we should just move to a very short block time (<< 1s) instead of having instant finality.

Would be perfectly fine from my side (if that actually solves the problem above, but I guess) :)

[athei]

The main concern from @cmichi was that it will slow down e2e tests against the node. But if we make the block time really short it should be no problem. I think we can go as low as we want since no networking is involved.

wdyt @cmichi ?

[cmichi]

We could also add a flag --instant for e2e tests and default to a block time of e.g. 0.5 sec (to have some orientation on what is available to parachains).

[cmichi]

@PierreOssun Do you have any thoughts here? And more important: would you by chance be up for implementing it 😊? Asking because you were so kind to do the original PR for instant finality.

[wottpal]

Just pushing this up once again, as I stumble across issues everywhere due to the instant finality nature of substrate-contracts-node.

For example I wanted to index my local node with Subsquid, and when starting its archive (https://github.com/subsquid/substrate-archive-setup) it says chain height: 0. But when connecting to a different local node (i.e. aleph-node) it works instantly. Already spoke to one of their devs who also assumes this is related to instant block finality.

[shunsukew]

@cmichi How about this approach?
If this seems good, I'll continue to make PR in the Substrate repo.
spawning new task which subscribes block import stream, and finalizes it after waiting for configured delay time.
https://github.com/shunsukew/substrate/pull/1/files

Same as spawning two tasks for e.g. aura (authoring) & grandpa (finality),
Nodes need to start two tasks in service.rs, run_instant_seal and run_delayed_finalize.

Now, delay_sec is set to 5 as hard coded. But, it is possible to make it configurable.
set to 0 -> instant finality
set to 1 -> 1 second finality after sealing a block

[shunsukew]

@wottpal
I'm preparing PR in Substrate, but it may take long time. you can use this swanky-node's branch if you wish inkdevhub/swanky-node#61, if approved I'm going to make swanky-node's release.

[shunsukew]

Released v1.6.0 with delayed finalize feature
https://github.com/AstarNetwork/swanky-node/releases/tag/v1.6.0

[wottpal]

Thanks @shunsukew, I just tried it, and it's working smoothly 👌🥳

It fixes both problems mentioned above:

• polkadot.js extrinsic status now gets finalized,
• local subsquid archive node is working as expected and recognizes block height (FYI @RaekwonIII).

Would love to see this in substrate-contracts-node, too @cmichi @athei 🤩

[shunsukew]

That's great to hear!

[athei]

Would love to see this in substrate-contracts-node, too @cmichi @athei 🤩

PRs welcome :)