Polkadot-API updates thread

Tech Talk
20

Hi there :wave:

It is been a while since our last post, we hope everyone had a nice start of year and month of January!

This update will be full of news, but expect a longer post during next week summarizing our last quarter with all the news, next steps, and more!

SDKs

Yes, PAPI SDKs are finally here! We’ve released the first versions of two SDKs, and now it’s your turn—give them a try, integrate them into your projects, and share any bugs or feature requests you come across!

@polkadot-api/sdk-ink

Our first SDK is officially out! Alongside its release, we’ve also published comprehensive documentation, which is now publicly available.

This SDK enables you to:

  • Deploy and redeploy contracts
  • Perform message queries (aka dry-run)
  • Send messages
  • Access contract storage

@polkadot-api/sdk-governance

We dedicated countless hours to building this, ensuring it is as complete as possible. Along the way, we also developed Polkadot Bounties, a dApp that lets users manage, explore, and create bounties (including child bounties). You can learn more about it in this post, which includes a live demo by @voliva, the lead developer behind the project! This dApp leveraged multiple SDKs from the list below, significantly contributing to bug fixes across both the SDKs and the main library.

The Governance SDK is divided into three independent sub-SDKs:

  • Referenda: Enables interaction with referendums, featuring:
    • Referenda creation:
      • Preimage abstraction
      • Automatic track selection
    • Referenda info:
      • Calculates expected confirmation start and end blocks based on current voting details
      • Includes off-chain referendum details (Polkassembly/Subsquare descriptions and titles)
  • ConvictionVoting: Provides a high-level abstraction over the entire pallet, offering:
    • Simplified voting with aye/nay and conviction or split votes
    • Locks management, including retrieving lock information and calculating the optimal unlock schedule to bypass pallet limitations
  • Bounties: Beyond offering functions to retrieve and categorize bounties, its most powerful feature is its ability to abstract all possible bounty states, ensuring that only valid actions are performed based on the current state.

This is only a small portion of what’s possible with our new Governance SDK, please read the docs for further details!

polkadot-api news

watchEntries

Watching all entries in a storage sub-tree was actually a recurrent request from our adopters, and we were finally able to deliver! It took longer than expected because we wanted to ensure that it was working on many different situations, including light-client, big sub-trees, etc. Besides that, during the development we discovered that RFC-0009 was never merged, and we raised awareness of it. Therefore, it was merged a few days later, and the implementation of it will optimize some parts of our watchEntries implementation, particularly in terms of bandwidth consumption (among other improvements).

Transaction Improvements

  • Fee Estimation: We identified an issue where transaction fee estimation was not functioning correctly for chains running a runtime with metadata v14. This was promptly fixed, and a patch was released immediately upon discovery to ensure users were not affected.
  • Transaction Extensions: Optional unknown extensions will now default to the None variant if no user input is provided. Previously, this would trigger an exception, which was unnecessarily strict.

Other Quality of Life Enhancements

We addressed several bugs and regressions while also implementing improvements to the CLI. These changes enhance the developer experience for specific use cases.

Thanks for reading our (as usual) long update, and see you next time!

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