counter intuitive user experience using -text as parameter to json

[erik78se]

It is a bit counter intuitive user experience when run against a polkadot websocket.

This was my call: wsstat -text '{"id": 1, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "mmr_generateProof", "params": [[1021312]]}' ws://192.168.109.179:9933

It returns:

Target: 192.168.109.179
IP: 192.168.109.179
WS version: 13

  DNS Lookup    TCP Connection    WS Handshake    Message RTT
|      0ms  |            6ms  |         15ms  |       11ms   |
|           |                 |               |              |
|  DNS lookup:0ms             |               |              |
|                 TCP connected:6ms           |              |
|                                       WS done:15ms         |
-                                                        Total:27ms    

Response: [123 34 106 115 111 110 114 112 99 34 58 34 50 46 48 34 44 34 114 101 115 117 108 116 34 58 123 34 98 108 111 99 98 98 54 55 98 56 53 101 99 98 54 48 54 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 50 99 48 48 48 48 48 48 52 100 101 57 51 54 50 55 102 125]

• I wasn't expecting to pass -text (I thought -json should work, but it didn't) - why text and not -json ?
• It would be great if the result data wasnt all byte encoded but that wsstat could automatically convert it if possible such as that the results could be comparable to curl.

[jakobilobi]

Automatic conversion should be possible for -text, for sure.

The -json option at the moment assumes just an input method, e.g. -json mmr_generateProof. Perhaps it would be better to have an option -json which takes a raw JSON string as in your example, and another -method which accepts just a method.

Thoughts?

[erik78se]

• I think that the automatic detection and conversion of return-type payload would make alot of sense and perhaps be default and perhaps, if you think its what the tool should do, it to allow the data be passed as binary 8bit output for pipeing into other tools for debugging.

• I was very confused initially when I was passing what I thought to be json and only when switching to -text it was accepted. But maybe I'm missing something on how the tool needs to operate?

[jakobilobi]

Started addressing this issue, PR with initial changes: https://github.com/jakobilobi/wsstat/pull/11

Planning to add in the near future:

• Binary output
• Automatic decoding of responses
• Better explanation of what the different input options mean

[jakobilobi]

PR https://github.com/jakobilobi/wsstat/pull/12 adds "raw" output as an option, and automatically decodes responses into JSON.

I'll make another sweep to improve the --help command before closing this issue.