7

in iota docs it says:

Inclusion State - is used to determine if a transaction was accepted and confirmed by the network. more specifically, given a transaction and a list of tips: Inclusion State is true if tip references that transaction.

Why is Inclusion State true, if tip references it? Doesn't it have to be a milestone?

instantlink
  • 528
  • 2
  • 10

1 Answers1

5

In the getInclusionStates api call you have two parameters. The first, 'transactions' parameter is an array of transaction hashes that you want to check the inclusion state for, and the second, 'tips' parameter is an array of transaction hashes that you wish to use as a reference to determine if they include the 'transactions'. You can pass a milestone as a parameter to the 'tips' array in order to determine if it was confirmed by that milestone, or you can use getLatestInclusion which does that for you. Both functions return a boolean but getInclusionStates allows you to pass different tips to check if they approve a specific transaction while getLatestInclusion only checks against the latest milestone. Currently we only consider a transaction confirmed if it is referenced by a milestone but in the future we will either not have milestones to check against or not depend so heavily on them.

Someone might use getInclusionStates to determine if a random tip includes a transaction is if they want to determine the confirmation percentage of a transaction they can run getTransactionsToApprove 50 times (100 tips) and pass the tips to getInclusionStates and the number of tips that return true would be the confirmation percentage. That can obviously be done without 50 API calls with a little tweaking but the point is valid.

Johnny Milkshakes
  • 161
  • 7
  • So getInclusionStates returns an acceptance percentage while getLatestInclusion using a milestone returns a foolproof statement (yes/no) for its confirmation? Thank you for your post. One has to clearly distinguish between acceptance and confirmation as these two functions apparently do – instantlink Jul 06 '18 at 18:12
  • Both return a boolean for each transaction passed but getLatestInclusion allows you to use different tips as opposed to only the most recent milestone. My example was just something i thought of off the top of my head why someone might want the inclusion states of different tips. – Johnny Milkshakes Jul 06 '18 at 18:16
  • Hi Johnny, it would be great if you could include the additional information from the comments into the answer. You can ping me afterwards to remove comments. – Helmar Jul 21 '18 at 08:02
  • @Helmar like so? sorry for the delay – Johnny Milkshakes Jul 25 '18 at 18:22