Mapping didn't storing unique values

Question

I wrote this piece of code with the goal to store unique documents hash. Used mapping to accomplished that.

pragma solidity ^0.5.16;

contract DocumentHash{

    string public documentHash;
    mapping (string => string) hashAlreadyRegistered;
        
    function setDocumentHash(string memory hash) public {
        require(keccak256( abi.encodePacked((""))) != keccak256(abi.encodePacked((hash))), "Empty hash!");
        require(keccak256( abi.encodePacked((hashAlreadyRegistered[documentHash]))) != keccak256(abi.encodePacked((hash))), "Hash already registered");
        
        documentHash = hash;
        hashAlreadyRegistered[documentHash] = hash;
    }
 
    function getDocumentHash() public view returns(string memory) {
        return documentHash;
    }
}

When i start a local server (npm start) with geth connection and send a hash to this contract, it works fine. When i try to send same hash, it active the expected behavior (require condition). But if i for example, restart the local server and geth connection, i'm able to store the same hash that i stored already. Wont the hash's be unique? or my code fails somewhere?

Answer 1

Might sound silly, but are you sure you are not redeploying the contract on the restart? Make sure you are working on the same contract with the same state (data). If yes then you can try replacing your current validation with this one:

require(bytes(hash).length  > 0, "Empty hash!");
require(bytes(hashAlreadyRegistered[hash]).length  == 0, "Hash already registered");

I noticed that if I pass 123 to method setDocumentHash and after this I pass 1234 then I'm able again to pass 123 without the contract giving me error back which tells me something is not working with your validation?