Any ideas when this will get included into the main build?
It was pulled into what will become the 0.7 release a while ago.Documentation is now on the wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Raw_Transactions
I decided not to abbreviate "transaction" -- none of the other RPC calls use abbreviations. And the features have been tweaked a little bit.
There are some nice unintended-but-useful things you can do with it-- as documented on the wiki page:
Re-broadcast a transaction
If you want to re-broadcast a transaction right away, you can use the getrawtransaction and sendrawtransaction API calls to do that. As a bash shell-script one-liner it would be:
Code:
sendrawtransaction $(getrawtransaction $TXID)
(note that Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind automatically re-transmit wallet transactions periodically until they are accepted into a block).Validate a transaction without broadcasting it
If you have a raw transaction and want to make sure all of it's signatures are correct, you can use the signrawtransaction API call. Pass in the hex-encoded raw transaction, any inputs that bitcoind doesn't yet know about, and an empty array of private keys to use to sign the transaction. Passing an empty array of private keys will prevent signrawtransaction from doing any signing; if it returns "complete":1 then all of the existing signatures are valid and there are no signatures missing.