solidity/docs/contracts/events.rst

.. index:: ! event

.. _events:

******
Events
******

Solidity events give an abstraction on top of the EVM's logging functionality.
Applications can subscribe and listen to these events through the RPC interface of an Ethereum client.

Events are inheritable members of contracts. When you call them, they cause the
arguments to be stored in the transaction's log - a special data structure
in the blockchain. These logs are associated with the address of the contract,
are incorporated into the blockchain, and stay there as long as a block is
accessible (forever as of now, but this might
change with Serenity). The Log and its event data is not accessible from within
contracts (not even from the contract that created them).

It is possible to request a Merkle proof for logs, so if
an external entity supplies a contract with such a proof, it can check
that the log actually exists inside the blockchain. You have to supply block headers
because the contract can only see the last 256 block hashes.

You can add the attribute ``indexed`` to up to three parameters which adds them
to a special data structure known as :ref:`"topics" <abi_events>` instead of
the data part of the log.
A topic can only hold a single word (32 bytes) so if you use a :ref:`reference type
<reference-types>` for an indexed argument, the Keccak-256 hash of the value is stored
as a topic instead.

All parameters without the ``indexed`` attribute are :ref:`ABI-encoded <ABI>`
into the data part of the log.

Topics allow you to search for events, for example when filtering a sequence of
blocks for certain events. You can also filter events by the address of the
contract that emitted the event.

For example, the code below uses the web3.js ``subscribe("logs")``
`method <https://web3js.readthedocs.io/en/1.0/web3-eth-subscribe.html#subscribe-logs>`_ to filter
logs that match a topic with a certain address value:

.. code-block:: javascript

    var options = {
        fromBlock: 0,
        address: web3.eth.defaultAccount,
        topics: ["0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000", null, null]
    };
    web3.eth.subscribe('logs', options, function (error, result) {
        if (!error)
            console.log(result);
    })
        .on("data", function (log) {
            console.log(log);
        })
        .on("changed", function (log) {
    });


The hash of the signature of the event is one of the topics, except if you
declared the event with the ``anonymous`` specifier. This means that it is
not possible to filter for specific anonymous events by name, you can
only filter by the contract address. The advantage of anonymous events
is that they are cheaper to deploy and call. It also allows you to declare
four indexed arguments rather than three.

.. note::
    Since the transaction log only stores the event data and not the type,
    you have to know the type of the event, including which parameter is
    indexed and if the event is anonymous in order to correctly interpret
    the data.
    In particular, it is possible to "fake" the signature of another event
    using an anonymous event.

.. code-block:: solidity

    // SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0
    pragma solidity >=0.4.21 <0.9.0;

    contract ClientReceipt {
        event Deposit(
            address indexed from,
            bytes32 indexed id,
            uint value
        );

        function deposit(bytes32 id) public payable {
            // Events are emitted using `emit`, followed by
            // the name of the event and the arguments
            // (if any) in parentheses. Any such invocation
            // (even deeply nested) can be detected from
            // the JavaScript API by filtering for `Deposit`.
            emit Deposit(msg.sender, id, msg.value);
        }
    }

The use in the JavaScript API is as follows:

.. code-block:: javascript

    var abi = /* abi as generated by the compiler */;
    var ClientReceipt = web3.eth.contract(abi);
    var clientReceipt = ClientReceipt.at("0x1234...ab67" /* address */);

    var depositEvent = clientReceipt.Deposit();

    // watch for changes
    depositEvent.watch(function(error, result){
        // result contains non-indexed arguments and topics
        // given to the `Deposit` call.
        if (!error)
            console.log(result);
    });


    // Or pass a callback to start watching immediately
    var depositEvent = clientReceipt.Deposit(function(error, result) {
        if (!error)
            console.log(result);
    });

The output of the above looks like the following (trimmed):

.. code-block:: json

    {
       "returnValues": {
           "from": "0x1111…FFFFCCCC",
           "id": "0x50…sd5adb20",
           "value": "0x420042"
       },
       "raw": {
           "data": "0x7f…91385",
           "topics": ["0xfd4…b4ead7", "0x7f…1a91385"]
       }
    }

Additional Resources for Understanding Events
==============================================

- `Javascript documentation <https://github.com/ethereum/web3.js/blob/1.x/docs/web3-eth-contract.rst#events>`_
- `Example usage of events <https://github.com/ethchange/smart-exchange/blob/master/lib/contracts/SmartExchange.sol>`_
- `How to access them in js <https://github.com/ethchange/smart-exchange/blob/master/lib/exchange_transactions.js>`_