How can I trigger a quorum private smart contract deployment from my js client app?

Question

My question follows directly this answer to a similar question.

I need for my client app users to be able to trigger private contract deployment. I've tried using privateFor with both the web3 and web3-quorum npm packages, but it doesn't work: contract is deployed but not private.

I understand from the answer above that Quorum only allows creating a private smart contract from the node itself, because the node possess the keys to encrypt and decrypt everything.

So here's my question: Can a smart contract function itself deploy a private smart contract?

I will try but it will take me a while so maybe I can get an answer here before then.

Thank you

Answer 1

You need to mention the account addresses where you wish to post your smart contract and you need to mention this in your truffle file(truffle.js).

something like this:

var SimpleStorage = artifacts.require("SimpleStorage");

module.exports = function(deployer) {
  // Pass 42 to the contract as the first constructor parameter
  deployer.deploy(SimpleStorage, 42, {privateFor: ["ROAZBWtSacxXQrOe3FGAqJDyJjFePR5ce4TSIzmJ0Bc="]})
};

Answer 2

how are you? The post is a bit confusing as your question is somewhat unrelated to the rest of the contents of the post. I'll try to answer both, but please feel free to chime in so I can provide more detail.

Your question: Can a smart contract function itself deploy a private smart contract? Yes, if the contract was a Factory contract (factories: Create New Contract from within another contract of the same type in Solidity) and it was executed as a private txn, then newly factoried contract will also be private.

The rest of your post seems to talk about whether or not a contract is private. The first thing to mention here is that a participating node will be able to read this contract with the correct ABI. A node that is not a participant, will either get undefined errors or 0s for all values of this contract. That said, internally in Quorum, you will not see if a contract is private according to its ABI. To check if its private, you should track down the contract creation txn and check its "v" value -- this is explained in depth here: https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum/wiki/Transaction-Processing