Event Monitoring

Tip

For comprehensive insights into secure development practices, consider visiting the Development Recommendations section of the Smart Contract Security Field Guide. This resource provides in-depth articles to guide you in developing robust and secure smart contracts.

It can be useful to have a way to monitor the contract's activity after it was deployed. One way to accomplish this is to look at all transactions of the contract, however that may be insufficient, as message calls between contracts are not recorded in the blockchain. Moreover, it shows only the input parameters, not the actual changes being made to the state. Also, events could be used to trigger functions in the user interface.

contract Charity {
    mapping(address => uint) balances;

    function donate() payable public {
        balances[msg.sender] += msg.value;
    }
}

contract Game {
    function buyCoins() payable public {
        // 5% goes to charity
        charity.donate.value(msg.value / 20)();
    }
}

Here, Game contract will make an internal call to Charity.donate(). This transaction won't appear in the external transaction list of Charity, but only visible in the internal transactions.

An event is a convenient way to log something that happened in the contract. Events that were emitted stay in the blockchain along with the other contract data and they are available for future audit. Here is an improvement to the example above, using events to provide a history of the Charity's donations.

contract Charity {
    // define event
    event LogDonate(uint _amount);

    mapping(address => uint) balances;

    function donate() payable public {
        balances[msg.sender] += msg.value;
        // emit event
        emit LogDonate(msg.value);
    }
}

contract Game {
    function buyCoins() payable public {
        // 5% goes to charity
        charity.donate.value(msg.value / 20)();
    }
}

Here, all transactions that go through the Charity contract, either directly or not, will show up in the event list of that contract along with the amount of donated money.

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Prefer newer Solidity constructs

Prefer constructs/aliases such as selfdestruct (over suicide) and keccak256 (over sha3). Patterns like require(msg.sender.send(1 ether)) can also be simplified to using transfer(), as in msg.sender.transfer(1 ether). Check out Solidity Change log for more similar changes.