Other

The following commands provide useful miscellaneous tools:

chifra explore a quick way to open a blockchain explorer,
ethslurp an older tool that lets you call data from Etherscan. (This has issues of centralization and data quality, see explanation in its section).

Note: some of these tools, such as ethslurp, require an Etherscan key. Follow these instructions to add a key to your config.

Each data structure is created by one or more tools which are detailed below.

Abi

An ABI describes an Application Binary Interface – in other words, the Function and Event signatures for a given smart contract. Along with Names the use of ABIs goes a very long way towards making your Ethereum data much more understandable.

Similar to names of addresses, ABI files are not available on-chain which means they must be acquired somewhere. Unfortunately, the Ethereum community has not yet understand that Etherscan is not a good place to store this very important information. For this reason, TrueBlocks uses Etherscan to acquire ABI files and therefor one needs to get an Etherscan API key to use this function.

The following commands produce and manage Abis:

chifra abis

Abis consist of the following fields:

Field	Description	Type
address	the address for the ABI	address
name	the filename of the ABI (likely the smart contract address)	string
path	the folder holding the abi file	string
fileSize	the size of this file on disc	int64
lastModDate	the last update date of the file	string
isKnown	true if this is the ABI for a known smart contract or protocol	bool
isEmpty	true if the ABI could not be found (and won’t be looked for again)	bool
nFunctions	if verbose, the number of functions in the ABI	int64
nEvents	if verbose, the number of events in the ABI	int64
hasConstructor	if verbose and the abi has a constructor, then `true`, else `false`	bool
hasFallback	if verbose and the abi has a fallback, then `true`, else `false`	bool
functions	the functions for this address	Function[]

Notes

See the chifra abis command line for information about getting an Etherscan key.

Function

ABI files are derived from the Solidity source code of a smart contract by extracting the canonical function and event signatures in a JSON structure. The function signatures are hashed (using keccak) into four-byte encodings for functions and 32-byte encodings for events. Because the blockchain only deals with byte data, TrueBlocks needs a way to decode the bytes back into the human-readable function and event signatures. We call this process --articulate. Most TrueBlocks commands provide an --articulate option. See the commands themselves for more information.

The following commands produce and manage Functions:

Functions consist of the following fields:

Field	Description	Type
name	the name of the interface	string
type	the type of the interface, either ’event’ or ‘function’	string
signature	the canonical signature of the interface	string
encoding	the signature encoded with keccak	string
inputs	the input parameters to the function, if any	Parameter[]
outputs	the output parameters to the function, if any	Parameter[]

Parameter

Parameters are a constituent part of a Function or Event. The parameters of a function are each individual value passed into the function. Along with the function’s name, the parameters types (once canonicalized) are used to create a function’s four byte signature (or an event’s 32-byte signature). Parameters are important to TrueBlocks because we use them as part of the ABI decoding and the --articulate process to conver the blockchain’s bytes into human-readable text.

The following commands produce and manage Parameters:

Parameters consist of the following fields:

Field	Description	Type
type	the type of this parameter	string
name	the name of this parameter	string
strDefault	the default value of this parameter, if any	string
indexed	`true` if this parameter is indexed	bool
internalType	for composite types, the internal type of the parameter	string
components	for composite types, the parameters making up the composite	Parameter[]

Slurp

THIS SHOULD BE ETHERSCAN DATA RELATED, BUT IT’S NOT TIED IN, SO IT DOESN’T DO ANYTHING The traceFilter is an internal data structure used to query using the chifra traces --filter command. Its use may, in the future, be expanded for other use cases. Note that all fields are optional, but not all may be empty at the same time.

The following commands produce and manage Slurps:

chifra slurp

Slurps consist of the following fields:

Field	Description	Type
hash	the hash of the transaction	hash
blockHash	the hash of the block containing this transaction	hash
blockNumber	the number of the block	blknum
transactionIndex	the zero-indexed position of the transaction in the block	txnum
nonce	sequence number of the transactions sent by the sender	value
timestamp	the Unix timestamp of the object	timestamp
date	the timestamp as a date (calculated)	datetime
from	address from which the transaction was sent	address
to	address to which the transaction was sent	address
value	the amount of wei sent with this transactions	wei
ether	if –ether is specified, the value in ether (calculated)	ether
gas	the maximum number of gas allowed for this transaction	gas
gasPrice	the number of wei per unit of gas the sender is willing to spend	gas
input	byte data either containing a message or funcational data for a smart contracts. See the –articulate	bytes
hasToken	`true` if the transaction is token related, `false` otherwise	bool
articulatedTx	if present, the function that was called in the transaction	Function
compressedTx	truncated, more readable version of the articulation (calculated)	string
isError	`true` if the transaction ended in error, `false` otherwise	bool

Message

The Message type is used in various places to return information about a command. For example, when using the chifra names --autoname feature in the SDK, a Message type is returned.

The following commands produce and manage Messages:

Messages consist of the following fields:

Field	Description	Type
msg	the message	string
num	a number if needed	int64

Count

Shows the number of timestamps in the timestamps database.

The following commands produce and manage Counts:

Counts consist of the following fields:

Field	Description	Type
count	the number of items in the given database	uint64

Destination

The following commands produce and manage Destinations:

chifra explore

Destinations consist of the following fields:

Field	Description	Type
term	the term used to produce the url	string
termType	the type of the term	DestType
url	the url produced	string
source	the option that produced the url	string

Base types

This documentation mentions the following basic data types.

Type	Description	Notes
address	an ‘0x’-prefixed 20-byte hex string	lowercase
blknum	an alias for a uint64
bool	either `true`, `false`, `1`, or `0`
bytes	an arbitrarily long string of bytes
datetime	a JSON formatted date	as a string
ether	a big number float	as a string
gas	a 64-bit unsigned integer
hash	an ‘0x’-prefixed 32-byte hex string	lowercase
int64	a 64-bit signed integer
string	a normal character string
timestamp	a 64-bit unsigned integer	Unix timestamp
txnum	an alias for a uint64
uint64	a 64-bit unsigned integer
value	an alias for a 64-bit unsigned integer
wei	an unsigned big number	as a string

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Abi#

Notes#

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Parameter#

Slurp#

Message#

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Abi