Troubleshooting¶

Error: “<X> is not authorized to commit an update”¶

This error occurs when there are multiple obligables on a contract.

A cornerstone of Daml is that you cannot create a contract that will force some other party (or parties) into an obligation. This error means that a party is trying to do something that would force another parties into an agreement without their consent.

To solve this, make sure each party is entering into the contract freely by exercising a choice. A good way of ensuring this is the “initial and accept” pattern: see the Daml patterns for more details.

Error “Argument is not of serializable type”¶

This error occurs when you’re using a function as a parameter to a template. For example, here is a contract that creates a Payout controller by a receiver’s supervisor:

template SupervisedPayout
  with
    supervisor : Party -> Party
    receiver   : Party
    giver      : Party
    amount     : Decimal
  where
    controller (supervisor receiver) can
      SupervisedPayout_Call
        returning ContractId Payout
        to create Payout with giver; receiver; amount

Hovering over the compilation error displays:

[Type checker] Argument expands to non-serializable type Party -> Party.

Modeling questions¶

How to model an agreement with another party¶

To enter into an agreement, create a contract from a template that has explicit signatory and agreement statements.

You’ll need to use a series of contracts that give each party the chance to consent, via a contract choice.

Because of the rules that Daml enforces, it is not possible for a single party to create an instance of a multi-party agreement. This is because such a creation would force the other parties into that agreement, without giving them a choice to enter it or not.

How to model rights¶

Use a contract choice to model a right. A party exercises that right by exercising the choice.

How to void a contract¶

To allow voiding a contract, provide a choice that does not create any new contracts. Daml contracts are archived (but not deleted) when a consuming choice is made - so exercising the choice effectively voids the contract.

However, you should bear in mind who is allowed to void a contract, especially without the re-sought consent of the other signatories.

How to represent off-ledger parties¶

You’d need to do this if you can’t set up all parties as ledger participants, because the Daml Party type gets associated with a cryptographic key and can so only be used with parties that have been set up accordingly.

To model off-ledger parties in Daml, they must be represented on-ledger by a participant who can sign on their behalf. You could represent them with an ordinary Text argument.

This isn’t very private, so you could use a numeric ID/an accountId to identify the off-ledger client.

How to limit a choice by time¶

Some rights have a time limit: either a time by which it must be exercised or a time before which it cannot be exercised.

You can use getTime to get the current time, and compare your desired time to it. Use assert to abort the choice if your time condition is not met.

How to model a mandatory action¶

If you want to ensure that a party takes some action within a given time period. Might want to incur a penalty if they don’t - because that would breach the contract.

For example: an Invoice that must be paid by a certain date, with a penalty (could be something like an added interest charge or a penalty fee). To do this, you could have a time-limited Penalty choice that can only be exercised after the time period has expired.

However, note that the penalty action can only ever create another contract on the ledger, which represents an agreement between all parties that the initial contract has been breached. Ultimately, the recourse for any breach is legal action of some kind. What Daml provides is provable violation of the agreement.

When to use Optional¶

The Optional type, from the standard library, to indicate that a value is optional, i.e, that in some cases it may be missing.

In functional languages, Optional is a better way of indicating a missing value than using the more familiar value “NULL”, present in imperative languages like Java.

To use Optional, include Optional.daml from the standard library:

import DA.Optional

Then, you can create Optional values like this:

Some "Some text"    -- Optional value exists.
None                -- Optional value does not exist.

You can test for existence in various ways:

-- isSome returns True if there is a value.
if isSome m
  then "Yes"
  else "No"
-- The inverse is isNone.
if isNone m
  then "No"
  else "Yes"

If you need to extract the value, use the optional function.

It returns a value of a defined type, and takes a Optional value and a function that can transform the value contained in a Some value of the Optional to that type. If it is missing optional also takes a value of the return type (the default value), which will be returned if the Optional value is None

let f = \ (i : Int) -> "The number is " <> (show i)
let t = optional "No number" f someValue

If optionalValue is Some 5, the value of t would be "The number is 5". If it was None, t would be "No number". Note that with optional, it is possible to return a different type from that contained in the Optional value. This makes the Optional type very flexible.

There are many other functions in “Optional.daml” that let you perform familiar functional operations on structures that contain Optional values – such as map, filter, etc. on Lists of Optional values.

Testing questions¶

How to test that a contract is visible to a party¶

Use a submit block and a fetch operation. The submit block tests that the contract (as a ContractId) is visible to that party, and the fetch tests that it is valid, i.e., that the contract does exist.

For example, if we wanted to test for the existence and visibility of an Invoice, visible to ‘Alice’, whose ContractId is bound to invoiceCid, we could say:

submit alice do
  result <- fetch invoiceCid

You could also check (in the submit block) that the contract has some expected values:

assert (result == (Invoice with
  payee = alice
  payer = acme
  amount = 130.0
  service = "A job well done"
  timeLimit = datetime 1970 Feb 20 0 0 0))

using an equality test and an assert:

submit alice do
  result <- fetch invoiceCid
  assert (result == (Invoice with
    payee = alice
    payer = acme
    amount = 130.0
    service = "A job well done"
    timeLimit = datetime 1970 Feb 20 0 0 0))

How to test that an update action cannot be committed¶

Use the submitMustFail function. This is similar in form to the submit function, but is an assertion that an update will fail if attempted by some Party.