Blocks Data Exploration in the Chainlens Substrate Explorer

Abhijeet
Chainlens
2 min readJul 26, 2023

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Furthering our mission to ensure that the Substrate ecosystem has a high-quality open source explorer, we’ve rolled out some great new features for Chainlens substrate.

This also was an excuse to modify the top navigation bar and introduce a new sidebar.

The new menu option called Blocks has been added to the navbar; clicking on it shows a paginated view of the blocks sorted by the most recent blocks first

The new Blocks menu option

Every row in the list shows summary info about that block — its Id, height, creation time, hash and the number of extrinsics and events in that block.

We can view block information by clicking on the block height.

Viewing block information in Chainlens substrate Explorer

This page shows more details of the block such as its parent-hash, state-root and spec-version.

Underneath these details, we list the block’s extrinsics and events in a tabbed view.

Clicking on an extrinsic id link in the extrinsics tab will take us to a page that displays information about it

Extrinsic details in Chainlens

We see details about an extrinsic such as its timestamp, a navigable link to the associate block page, hash, action and the parameters.

We also see a list of all the events related to this extrinsic.

Our goal for Chainlens Substrate is to provide a high-quality explorer for the Substrate ecosystem. Alongside its existing support for ink! contract verification we’re now working to provide more high impact features for its users.

If you want to join the discussion, you can join the Chainlens Telegram group or reach out via Twitter or email.

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