Application architecture

This section describes our recommended design of a full-stack Daml application.

The above image shows the recommended architecture. Of course there are many ways how you can change the architecture and technology stack to fit your needs, which we’ll mention in the corresponding sections. Note that the Participant Node is integrated into the Daml drivers in some cases rather than being part of the Application Backend. See Daml Ecosystem Overview for more details.

To get started quickly with the recommended application architecture clone the create-daml-app application template:

git clone https://github.com/digital-asset/create-daml-app

create-daml-app is a small, but fully functional demo application implementing the recommended architecture, providing you with an excellent starting point for your own application. It showcases

• using Daml React libraries
• quick iteration against the Daml Sandbox.
• authorization
• deploying your application in the cloud as a Docker container

Backend

The backend for your application can be any Daml ledger implementation running your DAR (Daml Archive) file.

We recommend using the Daml JSON API as an interface to your frontend. It is served by the HTTP JSON API server connected to the ledger API server. It provides simple HTTP endpoints to interact with the ledger via GET/POST requests. However, if you prefer, you can also use the gRPC Ledger API directly.

When you use the create-daml-app template application, you can start a Daml Sandbox together with a JSON API server by running

daml start --start-navigator=no

in the root of the project. Daml Sandbox exposes the same Daml Ledger API a Participant Node would expose without requiring a fully-fledged Daml network to back the application. Once your application matures and becomes ready for production, the daml deploy command helps you deploy your frontend and Daml artifacts of your project to a production Daml network. See Deploying to Daml Ledgers for an in depth manual for specific ledgers.

Frontend

We recommended building your frontend with the React framework. However, you can choose virtually any language for your frontend and interact with the ledger via HTTP JSON endpoints. In addition, we provide support libraries for Java and Scala and you can also interact with the gRPC Ledger API directly.

We provide two libraries to build your React frontend for a Daml application.

Name	Summary
@daml/react	React hooks to query/create/exercise Daml contracts
@daml/ledger	Daml ledger object to connect and directly submit commands to the ledger

You can install any of these libraries by running npm install <library> in the ui directory of your project, e.g. npm install @daml/react. Please explore the create-daml-app example project to see the usage of these libraries.

To make your life easy when interacting with the ledger, the Daml assistant can generate JavaScript libraries with TypeScript typings from the data types declared in the deployed DAR.

daml codegen js .daml/dist/<your-project-name.dar> -o ui/daml.js

This command will generate a JavaScript library for each DALF in you DAR, containing metadata about types and templates in the DALF and TypeScript typings them. In create-daml-app, ui/package.json refers to these libraries via the "create-daml-app": "file:../daml.js/create-daml-app-0.1.0" entry in the dependencies field.

If you choose a different JavaScript based frontend framework, the packages @daml/ledger, @daml/types and the generated daml.js libraries provide you with the necessary code to connect and issue commands against your ledger.

Authorization

When you deploy your application to a production ledger, you need to authenticate the identities of your users.

Daml ledgers support a unified interface for authorization of commands. Some Daml ledgers, like for example https://projectdabl.com, offer integrated authentication and authorization, but you can also use an external service provider like https://auth0.com. The Daml react libraries support interfacing with a Daml ledger that validates authorization of incoming requests. Simply initialize your DamlLedger object with the token obtained by the respective token issuer. How authorization works and the form of the required tokens is described in the Authorization section.

Developer workflow

The SDK enables a local development environment with fast iteration cycles. If you run daml-reload-on-change.sh of the create-daml-app, a local Daml Sandbox is started that is updated with your most recent Daml code on any change. Next, you can start your frontend in development mode by changing to your ui directory and run npm start. This will reload your frontend whenever you make changes to it. You can add unit tests for your Daml models by writing Daml scenarios. These will also be reevaluated on change. A typical Daml developer workflow is to

1. Make a small change to your Daml data model
2. Optionally test your Daml code and with scenarios
3. Edit your React components to be aligned with changes made in Daml code
4. Extend the UI to make use of the newly introduced feature
5. Make further changes either to your Daml and/or React code until you’re happy with what you’ve developed

Command deduplication

The interaction of a Daml application with the ledger is inherently asynchronous: applications send commands to the ledger, and some time later they see the effect of that command on the ledger.

There are several things that can fail during this time window: the application can crash, the participant node can crash, messages can be lost on the network, or the ledger may be just slow to respond due to a high load.

If you want to make sure that a command is not executed twice, your application needs to robustly handle all the various failure scenarios. Daml ledgers provide a mechanism for command deduplication to help deal with this problem.

For each command application provide a command ID and an optional parameter that specifies the deduplication time. If the latter parameter is not specified in the command submission itself, the ledger will fall back to using the configured maximum deduplication time. The ledger will then guarantee that commands for the same submitting party and command ID will be ignored within the deduplication time window.

To use command deduplication, you should:

• Use generous values for the deduplication time. It should be large enough such that you can assume the command was permanently lost if the deduplication time has passed and you still don’t observe any effect of the command on the ledger (i.e. you don’t see a transaction with the command ID via the transaction service).
• Make sure you set command IDs deterministically, that is to say: the “same” command must use the same command ID. This is useful for the recovery procedure after an application crash/restart, in which the application inspects the state of the ledger (e.g. via the Active contracts service) and sends commands to the ledger. When using deterministic command IDs, any commands that had been sent before the application restart will be discarded by the ledger to avoid duplicate submissions.
• If you are not sure whether a command was submitted successfully, just resubmit it. If the new command was submitted within the deduplication time window, the duplicate submission will safely be ignored. If the deduplication time window has passed, you can assume the command was lost or rejected and a new submission is justified.

For more details on command deduplication, see the Ledger API Services documentation.

Failing over between Ledger API endpoints

Some Daml Ledgers support exposing multiple eventually consistent Ledger API endpoints where command deduplication works across these Ledger API endpoints. For example, these endpoints might be hosted by separate Ledger API servers that replicate the same data and host the same parties. Contact your ledger operator to find out whether this applies to your ledger.

Below we describe how you can build your application such that it can switch between such eventually consistent Ledger API endpoints to tolerate server failures. You can do this using the following two steps.

First, your application must keep track of the last ledger offset received from the transaction service or the command completion service. When switching to a new Ledger API endpoint, it must resume consumption of the transaction (tree) and/or the command completion streams starting from this last received offset.

Second, your application must retry on OUT_OF_RANGE errors (see gRPC status codes) received from a stream subscription – using an appropriate backoff strategy to avoid overloading the server. Such errors can be raised because of eventual consistency. The Ledger API endpoint that the application is newly subscribing to might be behind the endpoint that it subscribed to before the switch, and needs time to catch up. Thanks to eventual consistency this is guaranteed to happen at some point in the future.

Once the application successfully subscribes to its required streams on the new endpoint, it will resume normal operation.

Dealing with time

The Daml language contains a function getTime which returns a rough estimate of “current time” called Ledger Time. The notion of time comes with a lot of problems in a distributed setting: different participants might run different clocks, there may be latencies due to calculation and network, clocks may drift against each other over time, etc.

In order to provide a useful notion of time in Daml without incurring severe performance or liveness penalties, Daml has two notions of time: Ledger Time and Record Time:

• As part of command interpretation, each transaction is automatically assigned a Ledger Time by the participant server.
• All calls to getTime within a transaction return the Ledger Time assigned to that transaction.
• Ledger Time is chosen (and validated) to respect Causal Monotonicity: The Create action on a contract c always precedes all other actions on c in Ledger Time.
• As part of the commit/synchronization protocol of the underlying infrastructure, every transaction is assigned a Record Time, which can be thought of as the infrastructures “system time”. It’s the best available notion of “real time”, but the only guarantees on it are the guarantees the underlying infrastructure can give. It is also not known at interpretation time.
• Ledger Time is kept close to “real time” by bounding it against Record Time. Transactions where Ledger and Record Time are too far apart are rejected.

Some commands might take a long time to process, and by the time the resulting transaction is about to be committed to the ledger, it might violate the condition that Ledger Time should be reasonably close to Record Time (even when considering the ledger’s tolerance interval). To avoid such problems, applications can set the optional parameters min_ledger_time_abs or min_ledger_time_rel that specify (in absolute or relative terms) the minimal Ledger Time for the transaction. The ledger will then process the command, but wait with committing the resulting transaction until Ledger Time fits within the ledger’s tolerance interval.

How is this used in practice?

• Be aware that getTime is only reasonably close to real time, and not completely monotonic. Avoid Daml workflows that rely on very accurate time measurements or high frequency time changes.
• Set min_ledger_time_abs or min_ledger_time_rel if the duration of command interpretation and transmission is likely to take a long time relative to the tolerance interval set by the ledger.
• In some corner cases, the participant node may be unable to determine a suitable Ledger Time by itself. If you get an error that no Ledger Time could be found, check whether you have contention on any contract referenced by your command or whether the referenced contracts are sensitive to small changes of getTime.

For more details, see Background concepts - time.