Storage smart contracts library

Part of LaborX project. Provides a set of smart contracts to organize data storage in a centralized manner, providing an advanced approach for contract upgradability. More you information you can find in a blog post.

• StorageInterface - defines a set of compex types and operations that a user could perform on them;
• Storage - smart contract that plays role of centralized bank of information; access to "write" functions is restricted;
• StorageManager - organizes access to a storage by separating different scopes (crates) for different roles;
• StorageAdapter - basic contract that is intended to store a reference to a storage and link with StorageInterface library.

Installation

Organized as npm package this smart contracts could be easily added to a project by

npm install -s solidity-storage-lib

Usage

Right before you decided to use them add this library to package dependencies and import any contract according to this pattern, for example:

import "solidity-shared-lib/contracts/StorageAdapter.sol";

or

import "solidity-shared-lib/contracts/StorageManager.sol";

Cause you might want to use StorageManager without any changes (if you want to then skip this paragraph), you will need to deploy this contract. But due to imperfection of truffle framework when you write in migration files const StorageManager = artifacts.require("StorageManager") this artifact will not be found. You have two options:

1. Inherit from StorageManager and truffle will automatically grap contract's artifact;
2. Create a solidity file, for example, Imports.sol and add an import statement of StorageManager. (I would recommend this one because it will not produce one more contract name and looks more reasonable.)

Details

Contracts that wants to adopt storage approach should do the following:

1. Define a contract that will inherit from StorageAdapter contract. Add any number of internal types (from StorageInterface) to define your own data layout:

contract Exchange is StorageAdapter {	

	StorageInterface.Bytes32UIntMapping internal bidsStorage;
	StorageInterface.Address internal oracleStorage;
	StorageInterface.AddressesSet internal ownersStorage;
	//...
}

2. Defined variables from StorageInterface should be initialized to have their unique location. NOT DEFINING initial values MIGHT BREAK YOUR DATA. So remember to initialize your variables, for example, in constructor or in a separate method but before first usage of those variables:

constructor() public {
	//...
	bidsStorage.init("bids");
	oracleStorage.init("oracle");
	ownersStorage.init("owners");
	//...
}

3. Throughout a contract you can easily access to get/set/update data from/to those variables using store reference:

//...
function actionExample(address _newOracle) external returns (bool) {
	//...
	address _oracle = store.get(oracleStorage);
	address _owner = store.get(ownersStorage, 2); // get by index
	uint _userBid = store.get(bidsStorage, "myBid");
	
	//...

	require(_newOracle != 0x0);
	store.set(oracleStorage, _newOracle);
	store.add(ownersStorage, msg.sender);
	//... 
}
//...

Migrations

Migration templates are presented in ./migrations_templates folder so you can use them as a scaffolding for your own configuration. Basic scenarios covered by migration templates are:

• deploying Storage contract;
• deploying and initializing StorageManager contract;
• deploying user's smart contract which is inherited from StorageAdapter contract.

For more information and use cases look at tests.