This uPort demo is designed to showcase some of the basic features and approaches you will take to integrate uPort features into your project. Using uport-connect itself is quite simple but requires a little bit of understanding the flow for a typical implementation.
You are encouraged to run through the demo at demo.uport.me before picking apart the code.
Before making use of these features for yourself, we need to instantiate the uPort object with an identity.
Click here to see the setup code
The clientID is the public address of your app and the signer (wrapped with the SimpleSigner function) is the signing key of your app that you will help create JWT tokens. These bits of information are given to you after creating an application with the uPort App Manager.
Click here to see the login (request credentials) code with a custom QR image
By default the uport-connect library will fire a QR image inside of an injected global modal to help you get up an running quickly.
This can be disabled by intercepting the URI so you may use another library to customize the look and feel of the QR image.
Once the user has scanned the displayed QR image, and has submitted their credentials, the promise should resolve with a Schema.org person JSON data payload. You can then handle this data however you desire in the then function.
uport.requestCredentials documentation can be found here
In a typical application, upon load, there is data usually being requested by a server to get the current state of the user's data. We must do the same here, but rather than reading a SQL database, we are instead reading the blockchain. At ConsenSys we use our Web 3.0 infrastructure stack called Infura to make the amount of possible calls scalable. You could otherwise have an Ethereum node local on your machine with a downloaded copy of the blockchain you could query. Calls can be simulated without having a copy of the blockchain though using a local TestRPC node, but thats out of scope for this explainer.
uPort comes pre-baked with a web3 instance that calls to Infura to make your life easy. All you need to do is grab our web3 object and instantiate a smart contract javascript object with a provided ABI.
An ABI (Application BINARY Interface) can be generated by compiling your smart contract with the Remix Web IDE. Its on the "Contracts" tab down where it says interface. You can deploy this contract to the chain with the Web3 deploy code just below that in your local Ethereum node console or with our build & deploy tool called Truffle.
With the uPort library, when a transaction is going to be signed, if the notifications flag is set to true when requesting credentials initially, it will allow any future transaction signing to fire a prompt in the uPort mobile app.
When a transaction is signed and submitted to a smart contract, the Ethereum network takes time to mine (confirm) the transaction (typically 15 seconds). During this time we will need to poll the Web3 node (aka provider and in our case, its Infura), to see if its been mined. We will keep checking it with a function called waitForMined and have a pending callback and a success callback to manage state.
Click here to see the contract instantiation code
Click here to see the getShares code
Click here to see the updateShares (transaction signing) code
Click here to see the waitForMined code
One of the core needs of Web 3.0 is to build trust in a self-soverign world. We establish facts which are not mathmatically derived by social consensus. To create social consensus, actors must attest to things being true. We can do this with uPort using the attestCredentials function.
Click here to see the attestation code
You have now have good grasp about how to use uPort and how to manage the user experience of Web 3.0 applications. Welcome!
$ git clone [email protected]:uport-project/demo.git
$ yarn install
npm run start
You will need Amazon S3 permissions to deploy - Contact andres
To deploy to demo.uport.me
npm run deploy
To deploy to demo.uport.space
npm run deploy-test