The voting smart contract#

This is the first part of a tutorial on smart contract development. In this part you will focus on how to write a smart contract in the Rust programming language using the concordium-std library.

The voting smart contract allows for conducting an election with several voting options. An end_time is set when the election is initialized. Only accounts are eligible to vote. Each account can change its selected voting option as often as it desires until the end_time is reached. No voting is possible after the end_time.

Warning

This contract is not meant for production. It is an example to illustrate how to use the standard library and the tooling Concordium provides. There is no claim that the logic of the contract is reasonable or safe. Do not use these contracts as-is for anything other then experimenting.

Preparation#

Before you start, make sure to have the necessary tooling to build Rust contracts. The guide Install tools for development shows you how to do this. Also, make sure to have a text editor for writing Rust.

You also need to set up a new smart contract project. Follow the guide Set up a smart contract project and return to this point afterwards.

You are now ready to write a smart contract for the Concordium blockchain!

Basic setup#

The source code of your smart contract is going to be in the src directory, which already contains the file lib.rs, assuming you follow the above guide to set up your project.

Open src/lib.rs in your editor and you’ll see some code for writing tests, which you can delete for now. You will come back to tests later in this tutorial.

First, bring everything from the concordium-std library into scope by adding the line:

use concordium_std::*;

This library contains everything needed to write a smart contract, such as some parameters, functions, and tests. It provides convenient wrappers around some low-level operations making your code more readable, and although it is not strictly necessary to use this, it will save a lot of code for the vast majority of contract developers.

The example voting contract allows for the operations:

  • initializing the election;

  • view general information about the election.

  • vote for one of the voting options;

  • getNumberOfVotes for a requested voting option;

A few basic functions are necessary for voting to work.

  • init

  • view

  • vote

  • get_votes

InitParameter is called by the init function. In this example, it contains a description of the election, the voting options, and the end time of the election. Voting options is provided as a vector, however, it is important to remember that there is a limit to the parameter size (65535 bytes), so the size of Vec<VotingOption> is limited.

Note

Vec<VotingOption> (among other variables) is an input parameter to the init function. Since there is a limit to the parameter size (65535 Bytes), the size of the Vec<VotingOption> is limited. For more information, see Contract instance limits.

VotingView is the return value for the view function.

In the vote function, the contract specifies who may vote and when (accounts and before the end time). If a contract tries to vote, an error occurs.

let acc = match ctx.sender() {
    Address::Account(acc) => acc,
    Address::Contract(_) => return Err(VotingError::ContractVoter),
};

And if the end time has passed, an error occurs.

ensure!(ctx.metadata().slot_time() <= host.state().end_time, VotingError::VotingFinished);

get_votes gets the number of votes for a specific voting option.

State contains the state of the contract which can be mutated when invoking the vote entrypoint.

Initializing#

The election is open from the point in time that this smart contract is initialized until the end_time.

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