Types

Custom-defined types allow teams to express their dApp in any form they require. A CIDL can define all the required types to fulfill the needs; other CIDLs can import these types.

tip

You can define any number of data structures and fields required for your use case.

caution

We cannot specify another custom type in a field’s type

Definition

types is a key-value object. Where the key of the object is the name of the type, and the value is an object through which we define the type structure.

types:
  Gem:
    summary: Gem are collected by players when they complete a dungeon
    fields:
      - name: name
        type: string
        attributes: [ sol:cap=36 ]
        description: The name of the Gem
      - name: quality
        type: u8
        description: A value between 1-100 that determines the quality of the Gem

Keyword	Type	Optionality	Description
types	Map<TypeKey, TypeBody>	Optional

Type Key

Type name <type-name> must comply with the targeted programming language. The Type name is, the key to the type object map, is used to identify the data structure within the method definition. This identifier will also become the name for the smart contract data structure to be referenced within the code.

Type Body

The type body object defines additional keywords to describe the data structure

Keyword	Type	Optionality	Description
summary	string	Recommended	Documentation summary of the data structure. Supports markdown
fields	Array<FieldBody>	Required	An array of fields through which we can define the properties of the data structure. At least 1 field is required.

Field Body

The Field array field is required even if it has a single entry. Future reviews may include simple Type Definitions for single entry types

Keyword	Type	Optionality	Description
name	string	Required	The name of the property, it must follows the targeted programming naming convention
type	native | extended	Required	The data type of this property
format	string	Optional	Represents the internal format of the field. For example a String can represent a date, an email address or a url. Extended types can also be used to represent Blockchain Accounts, PublicKeys, etc.
attributes	Array<string>	Optional	Attributes to modify/extend the type
description	string	Recommended	Documentation of the field. Supports markdown

Web-based documentation

The types object can be visualized in the CIDL web-based doc. The documentation is automatically generated from our vscode-codigo extension.

Next steps

At this point we should have the basis of defining custom-types and the supported native and extended data types, read about native and extended data type here. If you have already read it, continue your learning path in the following links:

• Imports
• Methods

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