Is it possible to get all entries of a Mapping or Array?

Question

For debugging a smart contract, it would be helpful to see all entries of an Array or Mapping object in the smart contract.

When using Truffle, I can see individual elements of a public array with valid index i by running mycontract.myarray(i) but running mycontract.myarray() yields a BigNumber Error.

This question indicated that getting the full readout is not straightforward because the getter functions for mappings and arrays expect index keys. However, has anyone found a way to do this in geth or Truffle?

Answer 1

No.

The abi is limited to a finite number (16, or 8 for strings) of values. See over here for some organizational patterns Are there well-solved and simple storage patterns for Solidity?.

You want the client side to do the iterating over the list so the cost per call remains constant.

Hope it helps.