Smart Contract Schema Tool
Smart contracts need to be very robust. The generic nature of WasmLib allows for a lot of flexibility, but it also provides a lot of opportunities to make mistakes. In addition, there is a lot of repetitive coding involved in creating smart contracts. The setup code that is needed for every smart contract must follow strict rules. You also want to assure that certain functions can only be called by specific entities. You need to verify that mandatory function parameter values are present. And function parameter values and return values need to be converted between their binary representation and their actual data type in a consistent way.
The best way to increase robustness is by using a code generator that will take care of most repetitive coding tasks. A code generator only needs to be debugged once, after which the generated code is 100% accurate and trustworthy. Another advantage of code generation is that you can regenerate code to correctly reflect any changes to the smart contract interface. A code generator can also help you by generating wrapper code that limits what you can do to mirror the intent behind it. This enables compile-time enforcing of some aspects of the defined smart contract behavior. A code generator can also support multiple different programming languages.
During the initial experiences with creating demo smart contracts for WasmLib, we quickly identified a number of areas where there was a lot of repetitive coding going on. Some examples of repetition were:
- Setting up the
on_loadfunction and keeping it up to date - Checking function access rights
- Verifying function parameter types
- Verifying the presence of mandatory function parameters
- Setting up access to State, Params, and Results maps
- Defining common strings as constants
To facilitate the code generation, it was decided to use a schema definition file for smart contracts. The aspects of a smart contract that should be known by someone who wants to use the contract are all clearly defined in a schema definition file. This schema definition file then becomes the single source of truth for the interface to the smart contract. This schema definition file is then used by our Schema Tool to automatically generate a complete smart contract skeleton that reflects the schema definition and only needs to be augmented by providing the actual function implementations.
The schema definition file defines things like the state storage variables that the smart contract uses, the Funcs and Views that the contract implements, the access rights for each function, the input parameters and output results for each function, and additional data structures that the contract uses.
With detailed schema information readily available in a single location, it becomes possible to do a lot more than just generating repetitive code fragments. You can use the schema information to generate the interfaces to functions, and have parameters, results, and state variables that use strict compile-time type-checking. That removes a common source of accidental errors. The generated interface can also be used by client side code so that there is a single, consistent way of calling smart contract functions.
Another advantage of knowing everything about important smart contract aspects is that it is possible to generate constants to prevent repeating of typo-prone key strings, and precalculate necessary values like Hnames and encode them as constants instead of having the code recalculate them every time they are needed.
Similarly, since you know all static keys that are going to be used by the smart contract in advance, you can now generate code that will inform the host correctly about all Funcs and Views that are available in the smart contract.
Because of all this the code becomes both simpler and more efficient. Note that all the improvements described above are independent of the actual programming language that is being generated.
The schema definition file can also provide a starting point for other tooling, for example a tool that automatically audits a smart contract.
In the next section we will look at how the Schema Tool works.