Handling contract updates on emulator
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- Dominant language
- Go
- Stars
- 209
- Forks
- 87
- Avg merge
- 1d 17h
- Merged PRs (30d)
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Description
A Cadence developer will during the development process frequently change contracts which makes keeping the contract updated on the emulator a challenge. The Flow mainnet/testnet has limitations on updating the contracts which are too strict to support the initial development of contracts. This problem is present on flow dev but also on Playground. Bellow are two ways of how we are or could handle changes. Each with some downsides.
Current state
Current state handling allows contract updates by removing and redeploying the new contract which can lead to a case where a resource was saved in an account but the contract update removes the resource altogether making the stored resource invalid.
| Blocks | Account Alice | Account Bob | State Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Foo(contract ver:1) | X | |
| 2 | Foo(contract ver:2) | Created | |
| 3 | Foo(contract ver:2) | ||
| 4 | Foo(contract ver:2), Zoo(resource) | Zoo(resource) | |
| 5 | Foo(contract ver:3 - removed Zoo resource type), Zoo(resource) | Zoo(resource) | Non-existing resource Zoo on account Alice and Bob |
State handling with reset
State handling with reset always resets the state after updating the contract thus also clearing the accounts with possible no-longer valid types, however, it presents another problem where any accounts created after will no longer exist.
| Blocks | Account Alice | Account Bob | State Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Foo(contract ver:1) | X | |
| 1 | Foo(contract ver:2) | X | |
| Reset state | |||
| 2 | Foo(contract ver:2) | Created | |
| 1 | Foo(contract ver:3) | X | |
| Reset state | |||
| 1 | Foo(contract ver:3),Zoo(resource) | Created | |
| 2 | Foo(contract ver:4),Zoo(resource) | Zoo(resource) | |
| Reset state | |||
| 1 | Foo(contract ver:4) | X |
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reviewing the Flow CLI's current emulator contract-update handling and the two state-management approaches described in the issue. Compare redeployment with state reset against the resource and account scenarios in the tables. Done requires a decided approach for safely handling contract updates on flow dev and Playground.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- go
- Domain
- blockchain, cli
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100