Getting Started

To develop for ConfluxPortal, you're first going to want to get ConfluxPortal installed on your development machine. Download here.

Once you have it running, you should find that new browser tabs have a window.conflux object available in the console. This is the way ConfluxPortal provides for you to interact with it.

You can review the full API for that object here.

Basic Considerations

ConfluxJS Browser Detection

The first thing your app will want to do is verify whether the user is using ConfluxPortal or not, which is simple using a check like if (typeof window.conflux !== 'undefined') { /* deal with it */ }.

Running a Test Network

In the top right menu of ConfluxPortal, you can select the network that you are currently connected to. Among several popular defaults, you'll find Custom RPC and Localhost 12539. These are both useful for connecting to a test blockchain, like conflux local network lite.

Since your seed phrase is the power to control all your accounts, it is probably worth keeping at least one seed phrase for development, separate from any that you use for storing real value. One easy way to manage multiple seed phrases with ConfluxPortal is with multiple browser profiles, each of which can have its own clean extension installations.

Resetting Your Local Nonce Calculation

If you're running a test blockchain, and then restart it, you can accidentally confuse ConfluxPortal, because it calculates the next nonce based on both the network state and the known sent transactions.

To clear ConfluxPortal's transaction queue, and effectively reset its nonce calculation, you can use the Reset Account button in Settings (available in the top-right sandwich menu).

Detecting ConfluxPortal

If you want to differentiate ConfluxPortal from other conflux-compatible browsers, you can detect ConfluxPortal using conflux.isConfluxPortal.

User State

Currently there are a few stateful things you want to consider when interacting with this API:

• What is the current network?
• What is the current account?

Both of these are available synchronously as conflux.networkVersion and conflux.selectedAddress. You can listen for changes using events too, see (the API reference).

Connecting to ConfluxPortal

"Connecting" or "logging in" to ConfluxPortal effectively means "to access the user's Conflux account(s)".

You should only initiate a connection request in response to direct user action, such as clicking a button. You should never initiate a connection request on page load.

We recommend that you provide a button to allow the user to connect Conflux Portal to your dapp. Clicking this button should call the following method:

conflux.send("cfx_requestAccounts")

This promise-returning function resolves with an array of hex-prefixed conflux addresses, which can be used as general account references when sending transactions.

Over time, this method is intended to grow to include various additional parameters to help your site request all the setup it needs from the user during setup.

Since it returns a promise, if you're in an async function, you may log in like this:

const accounts = await conflux.send("cfx_requestAccounts")
const account = accounts[0] // We currently only ever provide a single account,
// but the array gives us some room to grow.

Choosing a Convenience Library

Convenience libraries exist for a variety of reasons.

Some of them simplify the creation of specific user interface elements, some entirely manage the user account onboarding, and others give you a variety of methods of interacting with smart contracts, for a variety of API preferences, from promises, to callbacks, to strong types, and on.

The provider API itself is very simple, and wraps Conflux JSON-RPC formatted messages, which is why developers usually use a convenience library for interacting with the provider, like js-conflux-sdk, or others. From those tools, you can generally find sufficient documentation to interact with the provider, without reading this lower-level API.