Verify a (Metamask) transaction has happened on NodeJS - blockchain

What is the best way to verify a (Metamask) transaction has happened on NodeJS?
Use case:
A user buys a digital card with ether. After the user buys the digital card, a route on the server runs some code, makes a PDF, etc..
What is the recommended way to have a server (ExpressJS) verify that a tx has happened and is successful?
I was thinking of two options, but I'm pretty new to Ethereum so I'm probably missing some details here.
Have the server listen to events from the contract. When an event comes in, it'll have the user's address and prove they paid. Then I can make the card.
The only thing that I'm concerned here with is that maybe some details of the card are private. And if it's in the logs, it'll be public.
or..
OR have the user sign the message locally, push it to the server and somehow send it to the contract. I'm not sure what the details are with this route.
Are there any recommended ways to accomplish something like this?

I am not sure if I could understand the problem properly, but I will try to give some help.
In the first case the logs will not have any private information unless you write it in a event, return it or store it in a public variable. Your main concern should be how you send the information to the contract, if it is not somehow encrypted it could be a problem. That said I would prefer the second solution.
Also, you can await for the transaction logs and check if it is succeeded or also make it asynchronously.
const receipt = await contract.methods.yourFunction().send({ from: address });
contract.methods
.yourFunction()
.send({ from: address })
.then(receipt => {
// Do something with your receipt
});

Related

Best way to do TRC20 transaction callbacks

I am working on TRC20 network and I am using it to monitor a list (1000+) addresses to check if there are any USDT being sent in.
I tried 2 methods but I am not sure what is the best approach to do this.
Method 1: which is the .watch() function from the official documentation
https://developers.tron.network/reference/methodwatch
I am able to get lots of transaction information, but I did a test with my own transactions and its really wonky, as in I am not able to catch my own transactions reliably.
Method 2: calling the api to get all transactions of a wallet address.
https://developers.tron.network/reference/get-transaction-info-by-account-address
The issue with this is I have to do polling every x minutes on 1000+ addresses ( which will grow in the future).
Would like to ask if anyone could share how do platforms monitor their addresses. I joined the tron developer community and its full of scammers.
Method 2:

AWS SES Production Access setup with Meteor

Setting up Meteor to use "out of the box" AWS SES is simple, and one can use native Meteor "Email" methods without modification.
Steps to implement this can be found here. Thanks to Brian
Shamblen for putting together a detailed answer.
But one caveat with the "out of the box" SES is you need to both verify the sender and receiver email address.
To remedy this, you can put in a request with AWS SES for what they call, Production Access.
And further, according to Brian Shamblen,
The process to get production access is rather complicated. One will
need to handle bounce and complaint notifications from SES and prevent
messages from being sent to those addresses in the future.
Question
What is the Meteor code involved in handling bounce and complaint notifications from SES and prevent messages from being sent to those addresses in the future?
EDIT: Made modifications to question for clarity.
Requesting production access is fairly straightforward. You just need to contact them and they usually give it to you in a couple of hours.
Information about the process is here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/request-production-access.html
Load up the URL : http://aws.amazon.com/ses/fullaccessrequest/ and let them know what you will be sending via Emails, for example if you will be sending transaction based email (verification of a transaction, etc)
With production access you can either send email from:
A specific verified email address, where you will be asked to click a link to an email sent to that address to verify you own it
Any email under an entire domain. Under this process you prove you own the domain by editing its DNS records to contain a 'key'.
Most use cases are covered under production access, they typically give you 2000 emails a day and rate limit emails to 5/sec (they queue them so the maximum send rate is 5/sec). If you need more than this you can contact them to raise this additionally.
The process of verification is to stop people quickly creating AWS accounts to mass-spam users. If they allowed this straight-off then AWS IPs would be looked at as spam by other email providers.
For bounce notifications, SES tracks these, and you have to make sure that you don't get an above average bounce rate. Typically these would come from sending unsolicited email, which I wouldn't advise sending via SES.
Production access is only approved by the AWS team. Wait a bit and they should easily give you 2.000 emails/day for free.
As per bounces-unsubscribes... You'll need to have the SES API notify you of each email address which has been 'marked' with such status.
You should store all those email addresses somewhere and tell your app not to send them ANYTHING else in the future.

How to send mass mail in Django and get status for every message?

I'm creating a web app for handling various surveys. An admin can create his own survey and ask users to fill it up. Users are defined by target groups assigned to the survey (so only user in survey's target group can fill the survey).
One of methods to define a target group is a "Token target group". An admin can decide to generate e.g. 25 tokens. After that, the survey can be accessed by anyone who uses a special link (containing the token of course).
So now to the main question:
Every token might have an e-mail address associated with itself. How can I safely send e-mails containing the access link for the survey? I might need to send a few thousand e-mails (max. 10 000 I believe). This is an extreme example and such huge mailings would be needed only occasionally.
But I also would like to be able to keep track of the e-mail message status (was it send or was there any error?). I would also like to make sure that the SMTP server doesn't block this mailing. It would also be nice if the application remained responsive :) (The task should run in background).
What is the best way to handle that problem?
As far as I'm concerned, the standard Django mailing feature won't be much help here. People report that setting up a connection and looping through messages calling send() on them takes forever. It wouldn't run "in background", so I believe that this could have negative impact on the application responsiveness, right?
I read about django-mailer, but as far as I understood the docs - it doesn't allow to keep track of the message status. Or does it?
What are my other options?
Not sure about the rest, but regardless for backgrounding the task (no matter how you eventually do it) you'll want to look for Celery
The key here is to reuse connection and to not open it again for each email. Here is a documentation on the subject.

Architecture for robust payment processing

Imagine 3 system components:
1. External ecommerce web service to process credit card transactions
2. Local Database to store processing results
3. Local UI (or win service) to perform payment processing of the customer order document
The external web service is obviously not transactional, so how to guarantee:
1. results to be eventually persisted to database when received from web service even in case the database is not accessible at that moment(network issue, db timeout)
2. prevent clients from processing the customer order while payment initiated by other client but results not successfully persisted to database yet(and waiting in some kind of recovery queue)
The aim is to do processing having non transactional system components and guarantee the transaction won't be repeated by other process in case of failure.
(please look at it in the context of post sell payment processing, where multiple operators might attempt manual payment processing; not web checkout application)
Ask the payment processor whether they can detect duplicate transactions based on an order ID you supply. Then if you are unable to store the response due to a database failure, you can safely resubmit the request without fear of double-charging (at least one PSP I've used returned the same response/auth code in this scenario, along with a flag to say that this was a duplicate).
Alternatively, just set a flag on your order immediately before attempting payment, and don't attempt payment if the flag was already set. If an error then occurs during payment, you can investigate and fix the data at your leisure.
I'd be reluctant to go down the route of trying to automatically cancel the order and resubmitting, as this just gets confusing (e.g. what if cancelling fails - should you retry or not?). Best to keep the logic simple so when something goes wrong you know exactly where you stand.
In any system like this, you need robust error handling and error reporting. This is doubly true when it comes to dealing with payments, where you absolutely do not want to accidentaly take someone's money and not deliver the goods.
Because you're outsourcing your payment handling to a 3rd party, you're ultimately very reliant on the gateway having robust error handling and reporting systems.
In general then, you hand off control to the payment gateway and start a task that waits for a response from the gateway, which is either 'payment accepted' or 'payment declined'. When you get that response you move onto the next step in your process and everything is good.
When you don't get a response at all (time out), or the response is invalid, then how you proceed very much depends on the payment gateway:
If the gateway supports it send a 'cancel payment' style request. If the payment cancels successfully then you probably want to send the user to a 'sorry, please try again' style page.
If the gateway doesn't support canceling, or you have no communications to the gateway then you will need to manually (in person, such as telephone) contact the 3rd party to discover what went wrong and how to proceed. To aid this you need to dump as much detail as you have to error logs, such as date/time, customer id, transaction value, product ids etc.
Once you're back on your site (and payment is accepted) then you're much more in control of errors, but in brief if you cant complete the order, then you should either dump the details to disk (such as csv file for manual handling) or contact the gateway to cancel the payment.
Its also worth having a system in place to track errors as they occur, and if an excessive number occur then consider what should happen. If its a high traffic site for example you may want to temporarily prevent further customers from placing orders whilst the issue is investigated.
Distributed messaging.
When your payment gateway returns submit a message to a durable queue that guarantees a handler will eventually get it and process it. The handler would update the database. Should failure occur at that point the handler can leave the message in the queue or repost it to the queue, or post an alternate message.
Should something occur later that invalidates the transaction, another message could be queued to "undo" the change.
There's a fair amount of buzz lately about eventual consistency and distribute messaging. NServiceBus is the new component hotness. I suggest looking into this, I know we are.

Web Services design

Company A has async pooling based webservice for notifications. Company B checks for notifications. Every time when it reads new notifications A deletes them from the system. Thus subsequent read requests return only new notifications. There is also requirement for the client B to interrupt the connection if there is no response within 30 sec.
This causes one potential problem: Due to unexpected slowness it is possible for A get the request deleted a notification and send the response back while B is already interrupted the connection. Under this scenario notification gets lost. Now one can argue that the core problem lies within operation realm (the HTTP response must be delivered withing 20 sec ) still on practice it is not always feasible.
How to design B (the client) to avoid this problem?
One way I can see is to do not delete the notifications by A and make B be aware of its state, so that it knows starting from what ID it needs to process notifications, but that presumes that ID will be sequential. Which is controlled by A. Even if B defines its own sequence A still has to be altered to return it back.
Are there any other approaches?
Thanks!
Web services in general are unreliable enough that it's rarely a good idea to make a "read" request serve double-duty as a "delete" request, especially without the client's knowledge. There is just too much risk of a connection dropping or timing out. There is no way to get around this only by modifying the client, because it's the server that is at fault here - the way it's designed is fundamentally unsuited for a web service.
I think you're on the right track with the incrementing IDs idea. The client knows (or can be modified to know) which notifications it's received, so if it can supply the ID of the last message it's received when it polls for notifications, the server should be able to respond based on that ID.
It really seems like Company A's webservice should be synchronous instead of asynchronous. If that is not possible, it may be a good idea to send a "ACK"-like response to a new Company A webservice that indicates a specific notification was received (by Company B) and can be deleted.