How to call a function that is inherited from another contract using Hardhat?

Question

I have deployed a smart contract that inherits ERC721EnumerableUpgradeable which inherits ERC721Upgradeable.

When I deploy using Remix, for example, I see the function safeTransferFrom, which is a function of the contract ERC721Upgradeable, despite I have just deployed my main contract, and all the methods that are public from inherited smart contracts are already there for me:

But when I use Hardhat and I want to test that same function, it seems that the ERC721Upgradeable contract is not being recognized, because I am getting the following error:

TypeError: smartVault.safeTransferFrom is not a function

The test I am running is this one:

  it("Owner should be able to transfer smart NFT", async function () {
    const { smartVault, owner, otherAccount } = await loadFixture(deploySmartVault);
    await smartVault.safeTransferFrom(owner.address, otherAccount.address, 0);
  });

How can I get to interact with that function using Hardhat?

Answer 1

The problem was that safeTransferFrom is a overloaded function. Overloaded functions are functions that are defined more than once, with the same name, but they take different types and/or number of arguments.

In ethers.js (which is the library that Hardhat uses under the hood), the syntax to call an overloaded contract function is different from the syntax to call a non-overloaded function.

Overloaded functions need to be called by specifying the function signature.

From the ethers.js docs:

// ethers
const abi = [
  "function getMessage(string) public view returns (string)",
  "function getMessage() public view returns (string)"
]
const contract = new ethers.Contract(address, abi, signer);

// for ambiguous functions (two functions with the same
// name), the signature must also be specified
message = await contract['getMessage(string)']('nice');

So for the example in the question:

Wrong:

contract.safeTransferFrom(addr1, addr2, 1);

Correct:

contract["safeTransferFrom(address,address,uint256)"](addr1, addr2, 1);