Corda Transaction Tracking with NodePad v2

Corda Transaction Tracking with NodePad v2

Meet Don L Twain. A talented developer that recently came up with the next billion dollar business solution running on Corda. His App works wonders. He can create flows and transactions, has done successful demos with initial prospects. In fact, his first customers just moved to UAT few days ago and pushed their first transaction! Or did they? Sandy (the sender) swears she pushed a transaction to Rick (the receiver), whom has never seen anything popping up on his side.

Sounds familiar?

At this stage, three valid strategies that come to mind: Evasion, Blame and Log digging. While the first two have been tried and proven in large firms, Don doesn’t have any spare reputation to burn. Poor Don will have to shovel through gigabytes of logs with ‘vi’ and ‘grep’ as only friends. There must be a better way … right?

NodePad v2 comes with a neat feature called ‘Transaction Tracker’. It is a debugging utility that allows one to look for specific Transaction IDs within the context of a virtual Tracking Room.

How does it work? Sandy and Rick are both using NodePad independently. Sandy creates a Transaction Tracking room and shares the room Id with Rick. When he joins the room, both nodes show up and can share transaction statuses right away.

Sandy will pick any of her transaction, after the fact, through a pre-populated list of IDs. A request is sent to Rick through internet (off ledger) which will automatically fetch that ID in his own node. Transaction Id, along with status (found/not found) are displayed instantly in Sandy’s NodePad. In our particular scenario, it turns our Rick had not yet received transaction …37A0 .

No log digging, immediate clarity.

While sharing Transaction Ids over internet may not be the best for production, it is clearly a time saver for early phases of implementation. That being said we have nothing against emails, ‘vi’ and ‘grep’. But sometimes you can get the glory by not doing the hard work .

If you are not familiar with NodePad, in a nutshell it is an operation / monitoring utility for Corda nodes. NodePad can be downloaded at https://node-pad.net/