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Calling a View

The following snippet shows how to call the view entry point getString of the smart contract example1 without parameters:

res, err := chain.CallView("example1", "getString")

The call returns both a collection of key/value pairs res and an error result err in the typical Go fashion.

Calling a view process

The basic principle of calling a view is similar to sending a request to the smart contract. The essential difference is that calling a view does not constitute an asynchronous transaction, it is just a direct synchronous call to the view entry point function, exposed by the smart contract.

Therefore, calling a view doesn't involve any token transfers. Sending a request (a transaction) to a view entry point will result in an exception. It will return all attached tokens to the sender (minus fees, if any).

Views are used to retrieve information about the state of the smart contract, for example to display the information on a website. Certain Solo methods such as chain.GetInfo, chain.GetFeeInfo and chain.GetTotalAssets call views of the core smart contracts behind the scenes to retrieve the information about the chain or a specific smart contract.

Decoding Results Returned by PostRequestSync and CallView​

The following is a specific technicality of the Go environment of Solo.

The result returned by the call to an entry point from the Solo environment is in the form of key/value pairs, the dict.Dict type. It is an alias of map[string][]byte. The dict.Dict package implements the kv.KVStore interface and provides a lot of useful functions to handle this form of key/value storage.

Since view calls are synchronous, in normal smart contracts operations one can only retrieve results returned by view calls. Sending a request to a smart contract is normally an asynchronous operation, and the caller cannot retrieve the result. However, in the Solo environment, the call to PostRequestSync is synchronous, and the caller can inspect the result: this is a convenient difference between the mocked Solo environment, and the distributed UTXO Ledger used by Wasp nodes. It can be used to make assertions about the results of a call in the tests.

In the TestTutorial3 example res is a dictionary where keys and values are binary slices. The following fragment creates object par which offer all kinds of useful function to take and decode key/value pairs in the kv.KVStoreReader interface (the logger is used to log the data conversion and any errors that may occur). The second statement takes the value of the key paramString from the key/value store and attempts to decode it as a string. It panics if the key does not exist, or the data conversion fails.

 par := kvdecoder.New(res, chain.Log)
 returnedString := par.MustGetString("paramString")