web.eth.Contract support?

[johnhforrest]

The documentation isn't clear to me so I this seemed like the next best place to look for an answer--please redirect me if there's a better place for me to ask.

We're using the web3.js 1.0 beta and creating a web3.eth.Contract object locally to interact with our contract.

I checked the /v1/jsonrpc/network/methods endpoint to see if getPastEvents is supported but it's currently not listed. However, I'm able to point to the Infura RPC endpoint and call getPastEvents just fine. My question is this: is this officially supported? Is there documentation that describes the web3.js 1.0 supported functions?

Here's a snippet of code. Currently we poll every 15s looking at (blockHeight - 12) to see if any events in our contract were in the block:

const events = await contractObject.getPastEvents('allEvents', {
      fromBlock: block.number,
      toBlock: block.number,
    })

[ec2]

The docs you were referring to is to our Rest endpoints. But yes, we do support that function in our websocket endpoints. We are in the process of making our docs better and that will be released soon. To my knowledge and please let me know if im wrong, but in Web3, the getPastEvents is just a wrapper around the getLogs RPC command, as there is no getPastEvents RPC command in the clients.

[ec2]

For Web3 1.0 docs, I'd just look at the official Web3 docs for that.

[johnhforrest]

Thanks for the quick reply. You're right, I took a look at the web3.js source code and it's just a wrapper on getLogs, so that answers my original question.

To be clear, I'm not connecting to the websocket endpoint, just the HTTPS RPC endpoint sent in the original registration email. The only reference I found of the websocket endpoints was in #29 and not in any official documentation. Do you recommending connecting via websocket instead of RPC? If so, do you mind describing why and what the advantages are?

[ec2]

Ah. I'm not sure why I thought you were using the websocket endpoints haha.
I'd use the websocket endpoints if I were listening to events. The advantage is that you need not poll for new events. You will get em pushed to you instead.

[ec2]

The downside is that it is still in "experiemental" or beta mode right now and therefore there may be bugs.

[johnhforrest]

No worries. Thanks for the info Eric!