Get canister name from metadata?

[bitdivine]

Motivation

When working with multi-canister apps, the random-looking canister IDs are not very helpful. It is super-nice the way well-known canisters are shown by name rather than ID. Would it be possible to expand on this?

The focus here is on developers, not on some general domain name system.

Proposed change

• Step 1: Store the canister name in the wasm metadata under a key such as dfx_canister_name.
  • Precedent: When compiling a canister, it is possible to add metadata to a custom wasm section. For example, the nns-governance canister stores its commit ID there:

    $ dfx canister metadata rrkah-fqaaa-aaaaa-aaaaq-cai git_commit_id --network ic 
    10779a35b683eb991777bfdffda94145d33759db

    The idea would be to do the same for a developer-supplied name or set of tags.

• Step 2: Query canisters to get their name from the metadata and cache the response.
• Step 3: When rendering a request in IC inspector, show this name or set of tags in the canister column.
  • Note: The canister metadata is only as trustworthy as the developers creating the canister, the fields are not, for example, guaranteed to be unique. One canister could have the same name as another. This could be desirable when there is a test deployment and a production deployment. But someone evil might use it to try to hide malware as legitimate traffic. A such, I believe that caution has to be used when displaying the field, both to be sure that the field is sane (say a short utf-8 text) and so that someone looking at the request logs can see that this is not the same as a registered domain name or a well known, communally agreed name.

Next steps

• Are you in principle open to making such a change? I would be happy to contribute if you are short of time but would probably need some pointers as I am not familiar with this codebase.
• Also, it's worth checking in the community whether there is already some similar effort so that we don't end up with two different standards for the name metadata.

[bitdivine]

Note: A metadata key such as dfx_canister_name is probably pretty clear about what the data is and how much it can be trusted. It is similar in format to the git_commit_id already in use.

[jorgenbuilder]

There are a few projects that have approached this. Notable, DAB, which is integrated with this project already. Unfortunately, while DAB is still maintained to some degree, it's clear that their database of canister metadata has not received much attention from the maintainers or the developer ecosystem.

Integrating IC Inspector with a metadata standard that has significant adoption is a definite yes, however developing a metadata standard is a definite no. If you're entertaining such a project, I would add DAB to the list of projects to reach out to in the research phase.