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.

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:

FieldDescriptionType
namethe name of the interfacestring
typethe type of the interface, either ’event’ or ‘function’string
signaturethe canonical signature of the interfacestring
encodingthe signature encoded with keccakstring
inputsthe input parameters to the function, if anyParameter[]
outputsthe output parameters to the function, if anyParameter[]

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:

FieldDescriptionType
typethe type of this parameterstring
namethe name of this parameterstring
strDefaultthe default value of this parameter, if anystring
indexedtrue if this parameter is indexedbool
internalTypefor composite types, the internal type of the parameterstring
componentsfor composite types, the parameters making up the compositeParameter[]

Base types

This documentation mentions the following basic data types.

TypeDescriptionNotes
booleither true, false, 1, or 0
stringa normal character string

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