Contract Public Attributes

Other items to note in the top of this voter contract, we have created three public attributes on this: contract, chairperson, and proposals. This is where we'll be storing everything of more or less importance to the contract, our state.



address public chairperson;

mapping(address => Voter) public voters;

Proposal[] public proposals;

‍

chairperson is the address of the owner of the contract

is the address of the owner of the contract voters is a mapping of address to Voter structs, so you get a voter by looking up their address in that map. If a voter isn't found, it'll return a Voter struct with default empty values.

is a mapping of address to Voter structs, so you get a voter by looking up their address in that map. If a voter isn't found, it'll return a Voter struct with default empty values. proposals, not a huge surprise here, an array of the proposals, referenced by an integer index. Proposal is a custom struct, also defined in this contract.

Ballot Constructor

Like other languages, the constructor takes arguments and will instantiate an instance of this contract. However, with Solidity this doesn't just create an instance in memory, rather it creates a transaction or contract that lives on the public Ethereum blockchain. Also, slightly different from many other examples out in the Ethereum ecosystem, notice that this constructor takes in an array of names as an argument. More on this later.



function Ballot(bytes32[] proposalNames) {

chairperson = msg.sender;

voters[chairperson].weight = 1;

for (uint i = 0; i < proposalNames.length; i++) {

createProposal(proposalNames[i]);

}

}

function createProposal (bytes32 proposalName) {

require(msg.sender == chairperson);

proposals.push(Proposal({

name: proposalName,

voteCount: 0

}));

}





This constructor does two things:

• Sets the chairperson as the message sender (whoever created this contract.)

• Loops over the proposal names and adds them to the list of proposals.

In the example on the Solidity documentation site, they pushed each proposal into the proposals array directly in the constructor. I abstracted it out to another function because I wanted to directly test that functionality.

The remainder of the contract is more or less straightforward. There are many functions that either modify or access data. Lets dive into the functionality by writing some tests!

Getting Our Project Set Up

As mentioned above, we'll be using the Truffle framework for writing tests around this contract. Let's create a new Truffle project.

# install truffle

npm install -g truffle



# install local ethereum test environment

npm install -g testrpc



# create our project directory

mkdir ballot

cd ballot



# initialize the project

truffle init





This will give you a new project with the following directory structure:



├── contracts

│ ├── ConvertLib.sol

│ ├── MetaCoin.sol

│ └── Migrations.sol

├── migrations

│ ├── 1_initial_migration.js

│ └── 2_deploy_contracts.js

├── test

│ ├── TestMetacoin.sol

│ └── metacoin.js

└── truffle.js





Go ahead and delete the following files, we won't need them:

• contracts/ConvertLib.sol

• contracts/MetaCoin.sol

• test/TestMetaCoin.sol

• test/metacoin.js

Now, create the Ballot contract in the contracts directory, and paste the example code from the Solidity documentation into it. The starting contract is also available on this repository in case the Solidity folks ever remove that example.

Last, update the `migrations/2_deploy_contracts.js` file to only migrate our contract, and remove any references to the files that we already deleted. Note that in the migrations file, that is what will be deploying the contract to the Ethereum blockchain. If you want to instantiate the contract with some default proposals, that's the place. Here is my migration file for example:



var Ballot = artifacts.require("./Ballot.sol");

module.exports = function(deployer) {

deployer.deploy(Ballot, ['example proposal']);

};





As you can see, we are creating this Ballot contract with one proposal: 'example proposal'.

Tests

Now, create a file in the tests directory for our ballot. Here, we will only be writing the Mocha / JavaScript tests for now. Solidity, apparently, is rolling out its own unit testing utilities, and we'll save exploration there for another day. Since we are interacting with the contract through the _testrpc_ server, these tests will act more or less as integration tests against this contract.

There are definitely a few downsides to this method. The biggest drawback for me was not having access to the Solidity runtime environment, making debugging fairly difficult. I have gotten the error `invalid opcode` more times than I'd like to admit, and to me, that's just not a super helpful error message.

The upside is that since these contracts do have financial implications, it's nice to have a solid integration test suite around the various ways that the contract could be used, and it will document nicely how we expect to use the contract from a web service.

We'll be writing Mocha for our tests here, not quite as pretty as RSpec if you're coming from the Ruby world, but it does the job. Another funny thing is that the nature of interacting with these contracts through JavaScript, most everything returns a promise, so these do get a bit hard to read over time.

Before we get started, you'll need to fire up the testrpc server. Run `testrpc` from your command line. Now you have a local Ethereum virtual machine running with 10 example accounts that all hold 100 Ethereum apiece for testing purposes.

Truffle's Contract Block



contract('Ballot', function(accounts) {

it('our first test', function() {...});

});





So, the first thing that you should notice is that we're wrapping this testing environment with the `contract` function. This is some 'syntastic sugar' that Truffle provides us. Truffle calls this their "clean room environment," from the docs themselves:

Truffle provides a clean room environment when running your test files. When running your tests against the TestRPC, Truffle will use the TestRPC's advanced snapshotting features to ensure your test files don't share state with each other. When running against other Ethereum clients like go-ethereum, Truffle will re-deploy all of your migrations at the beginning of every test file to ensure you have a fresh set of contracts to test against a clean room environment when running your test files. When running your tests against the TestRPC, Truffle will use the TestRPC's advanced snapshotting features to ensure your test files don't share state with each other. When running against other Ethereum clients like go-ethereum, Truffle will re-deploy all of your migrations at the beginning of every test file to ensure you have a fresh set of contracts to test against.

Need to clean the state? Just create another contract block. The next thing that you should notice is the `accounts` attribute that is provided to the callback in the `contract` block. This is an array of the test accounts that TestRPC provides us. `accounts[0]` is the creator of the contract, and the rest are all just for testing the various interactions with the contract.

Testing Our Constructor

Next, we'll want to test that our constructor was effectively run along with the parameters that we defined in our migration file. These pieces should be fairly straightforward, as we are only testing that the setup was performed correctly. One item here of interest is that accessor methods, defined with the keyword `static` in our contracts, will be called using the `.call()` method on that given function, and each `call` returns a promise. You'll notice that most of the interactions with the contracts return promises. While possibly a nice feature in programming a web front end to the contract, it makes our tests a little ugly / hard to read (coming from a Ruby background, at least).



it("should initialize the owner as the chairperson", function() {

var ballotInstance;

return Ballot.deployed().then(function(instance) {

ballotInstance = instance;

return ballotInstance.chairperson.call();

}).then(function(chairperson) {

assert.equal(chairperson, accounts[0]);

})

});



it("should be initialized with one proposal using the constructor", function() {

var ballotInstance;

const FIRST_PROPOSAL_HEX = '46495253542050524f504f53414c';

return Ballot.deployed().then(function(instance) {

ballotInstance = instance;

return ballotInstance.getProposalsCount.call();

}).then(function(index) {

return ballotInstance.getProposalName.call(index.toNumber() - 1);

}).then(function(proposalName) {

var str = proposalName.toString();

var re = new RegExp(FIRST_PROPOSAL_HEX, 'i');

assert.match(str, re, "default proposal should have been created during migrations");

})

});





Modifying the State of Our Contract

Here are a few more examples. Note that for issuing a state change, we do not call the `call` method, we just call the function directly.



it("can create a proposal on the fly", function() {

var ballotInstance;

const BILL_FOR_PRESIDENT_HEX = '42696c6c20666f7220707265736964656e74'

return Ballot.deployed().then(function(instance) {

ballotInstance = instance;

return ballotInstance.createProposal("Bill for president");

}).then(function() {

return ballotInstance.getProposalsCount.call();

}).then(function(index) {

return ballotInstance.getProposalName.call(index.toNumber() - 1);

}).then(function(proposalName) {

var str = proposalName.toString();

var re = new RegExp(BILL_FOR_PRESIDENT_HEX, 'i');

assert.match(str, re, "Bill for president was found!");

})

});

it("should allow a user to vote on a proposal", function() {

var ballotInstance;

var allowedUser = accounts[1];

var notAllowedUser = accounts[2];

return Ballot.deployed().then(function(instance) {

ballotInstance = instance;

return ballotInstance.giveRightToVote(allowedUser)

}).then(function(txReceipt) {

return ballotInstance.getVoterWeight.call(allowedUser);

}).then(function(weight) {

assert.equal(weight.toNumber(), 1, 'allowed user is registered to vote'); return ballotInstance.getVoterWeight.call(notAllowedUser); }).then(function(weight) {

assert.equal(weight.toNumber(), 0, 'a user not registered cannot vote');

})

})



it("should be able to effectively delegate", function() {

return Ballot.deployed().then(function(instance) {

ballotInstance = instance;

return ballotInstance.giveRightToVote(accounts[3])

}).then(function() {

return ballotInstance.giveRightToVote(accounts[4])

}).then(function(txReceipt) {

return ballotInstance.delegate(accounts[3], { from: accounts[4] });

}).then(function() {

return ballotInstance.getVoterWeight.call(accounts[3]);

}).then(function(weight) {

assert.equal(weight.toNumber(), 2, "account 1 should be weighted");

})

})





On the last test here, we're wanting to specify who is sending the message. You can do that easily by passing an object as the last argument in the function and specifying the address of the sender in the `from` attribute of that object.

Testing Errors

Since this is a black box test environment, the best I could figure to test these `require` statements in the contract itself was to ensure that whatever command I executed was erroring really hard. So, we just check for errors using the God-given capabilities of the promises we've come to know and love. Here's a quick example of an expected failure:



it("should not allow a voter to delegate to themselves", function() {

return Ballot.deployed().then(function(instance) {

ballotInstance = instance;

return ballotInstance.delegate(accounts[0], { from: accounts[0] });

}).then(function() {

assert.fail('this should have failed');

}, function(e) {

// assuming bad opcode error here

assert(true, 'we should have hit this point as a failure');

})

})





I do this a few times in the example repository, the key here is to check for the failure in the second argument (callback) in the `then` statement. If you are using a `catch` block you'll probably get some false positives.

Accessing Public Attributes on a Contract

So, in writing these tests, there were a number of situations where I wanted to test the modifications that I was making to the state of the contract. For the most part, I could get what I needed by calling `call` on the given attribute of the contract, `chairperson` for example. However, when accessing items that are in arrays or maps, I had to write some accessor methods since the data structures aren't made readily available to the javascript interface. Note the following functions:

• getProposalsCount

• getVoterWeight

• winnerName

Additionally, strings are stored as byte arrays under the hood in a solidity contract, so when you get them back, you'll be looking at some hexadecimal representation of that string (also padded with spaces). If you check the tests where I'm verifying the names for the proposals, you'll see that I'm referencing the hex value of that string in the tests. `¯\_(ツ)_/¯` I'm clearly not a pro at this yet, and there is almost certainly a better way, or hopefully will be here soon.

Conclusion

Truffle seems like a decent framework for writing Solidity code, but the testing environment leaves a lot to be desired. I understand that this is more or less "black-box" testing, but I really hope that it becomes easier to work with contract internals in the near future.

I hope that the post was helpful. The Ethereum movement is changing fast, and there isn't a huge body of knowledge out there yet regarding best practices. But the underlying technology is hugely inspirational and has potential to really change how we think about a large class of applications. I, for one, am very excited to see where this DApp development world goes.