Result reporting for scheduled operations

[mikera]

Scheduled transactions / operations should have some form of result reporting. A scheduled transaction technically produces a result like a regular transaction at a later timestamp.

Technical notes / considerations:

• Unlikely to be an immediate report to client, since may occur at a much later time
• Peers may offer a service to allow clients to query scheduled results
• Possible to log the fact of event scheduling against current transaction (this could include time and sequential position)

[helins]

Looking at the problem differently, reporting the result does not matter. If the transaction can run to completion, users can decide how and where to store any meaningful result.

Hypotheses:

• What matters is knowing that the transaction failed
• Exceptions are not CVM types and should probably never be ; hence they cannot be reported on-chain
• Maybe reporting a simple boolean is enough (true in case of success)
• Then scheduling could imply: providing a correlation id + prepaying the storage of a boolean for that correlation id ; maybe in the user's holdings or something similar

[mikera]

Good ideas. I think that in general result reporting should be off-chain (responsibility of peer or anyone else who wants to validate at a later time). This consistent with transactions and in general I think it would be good if scheduled transactions are reported in pretty much the same way as regular transactions (result value and/or error code). Presence of an error code gives the boolean "did it fail?" semantics.