Box Storage Support

[algoanne]

(WIP)

Problem

Developers need to be able to use the new box storage from pyteal. We want to support:

• These opcodes:
  • [x] box_create
  • [x] box_extract
  • [x] box_replace
  • [x] box_del
  • [x] box_len
  • [x] box_get
  • [x] box_put

Solution

Possible syntax and questions to consider:

App.boxAlloc(Bytes("box name"), Int())

• where the second argument is the size of box, in # of bytes (has limitations, should we check these at the pyteal layer?).
• Implicitly is passed the app ID as well, which is needed to reference the box.

App.boxPut(reference-to-location, value being put) App.boxGet(reference-to-location) App.boxDel(Bytes("box name"))

Application calls need to be able to specify boxes (i.e. I think TxnObject needs a "boxes" property Txn.boxes)

[tzaffi]

Cf. #353

[ahangsu]

Just one question to confirm:

Referencing which boxes will be used in an app call (analogous to foreign arrays)

I suppose this is not quite applicable in current design (as of 2022/08/10), where boxes are not directly viewable like foreign array. It is done by app-args to manipulate boxes. Then I wonder if my assumption is wrong, or this line needs to be changed?

[michaeldiamant]

@ahangsu I think the ticket had a stale description based. Like you're suggesting, there's no exposed go-algorand functionality to extend in pyteal. So, I updated to remove the line item.

[ahangsu]

@michaeldiamant Thanks for the description update!