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I read this article about sorting an array on an off-chain backend, but there are some things I can't wrap my head around.

For example, say I have an array of times in no particular order arr populated on-chain. I want to send a copy of arr to an off-chain backend to sort the times in order and slice the array so that all the elements before a specified time are deleted. I then want the off-chain backend to send back the copy of arr back to the on-chain backend so that arr can be updated. My motivation for sending this array off-chain is for gas optimization

How does the off-chain backend "grab" arr and return a sorted and sliced version of arr specifically? The article mentioned event listeners. Do these listeners and the rest of the off-chain backend have to be programmed in another language (not solidity)? The author of the article doesn't give an example of what an off-chain backend would look like, so I'm not sure how the dynamic would be.

I've heard that people use oracles to access off-chain data. But from what I have seen, most of the data that dapps use from oracles are public data, like market feeds and weather data. Would I need an oracle to grab data from this sort of off-chain backend?

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There are several possible approaches for making the data available to the backend:

  • Using events. Events are cheaper, but the contract cannot access the data to validate so you have to solve that problem in another way (challenge/response, rewards/punishments, etc).
  • Store the data in the contract, the data is stored in the contract so it will be able to validate.
  • Use the transaction's input to store data, data will be inaccesible to the contract. You need to validate data in a different way.

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