Contracts - intended usage
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You interact with a æternity node through HTTP. To learn more about contracts and contract life cycles see .
There are two basic types of API calls, off-chain operations and on-chain transactions.
For an up to date list of all HTTP API endpoints and their arguments see
A number of functions described below create calldata for contract call or contract create transactions (,, ,). These support two ways of specifying the function and arguments to the call:
Unchecked (legacy): Function name (except for create/compute) and arguments
as a Sophia constant tuple. No checks are made to ensure that the given
arguments match what the contracts expects.
Checked: An argument call containing Sophia source code for a contract
snippet containing (at least) a prototype for the function to be called and a
special function __call() whose body is a single call to this function. This
contract is type checked and the given arguments are checked to be compatible
with the type that the called contract expects.
For example, to call a function swap that expects a record argument you can
give the following call:
The call contract can contain more definitions than are needed to type check
the call. In particular, it can be the complete source code of the contract
to be called, with an added __call function.
An æternity node provides some utility functions to help you create contract transactions and test contracts.
TODO => http compiler & other tools
TODO => http compiler & other tools
TODO still relevant?
The arguments to the /debug/transactions/dry-run endpoint are:
txs - a list of unsigned transactions to execute.
top - an optional blockhash at which to do the dry-run (if not specified top hash will be used).
accounts - a list of "extra" accounts to be used in the dry-run.
TODO => http compiler & other tools
An æternity node provides some APIs to format contract transactions and an API for submitting a signed transaction.
There are two contract transactions available: create and call.
You:
Format the contract transaction using the corresponding API;
(As for any other transaction) sign offline (i.e. outside of the æternity node) the transaction according to consensus;
In order to affect the state of the chain you have to submit the signed transaction to a mining node.
(As for any other transaction) submit the transaction to the æternity node using .