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[BUG] - cardano-submit-api cannot decode Dijkstra era transactions

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
78/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
haskell
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start in cardano-submit-api/src/Cardano/TxSubmit/Web.hs at readByteStringTx, where the issue shows the era decoder list ending at Conway. Read the cardano-cli fix linked in the issue for context, then check the submit API tests named in the report, especially the Dijkstra cases. Done means Dijkstra transactions with changed body-field encodings decode and submit rather than failing with TxCmdTxReadError.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug comp: submit-api Dijkstra PV12 needs triage

Internal/External
Internal

Area
Other (cardano-submit-api)

Summary
cardano-submit-api has no Dijkstra decoder. readByteStringTx in cardano-submit-api/src/Cardano/TxSubmit/Web.hs lists the eras by hand, and the list ends at Conway:

readByteStringTx = firstExceptT TxCmdTxReadError . hoistEither . deserialiseAnyOf
  [ FromSomeType (AsTx AsShelleyEra) (InAnyShelleyBasedEra ShelleyBasedEraShelley)
  , FromSomeType (AsTx AsAllegraEra) (InAnyShelleyBasedEra ShelleyBasedEraAllegra)
  , FromSomeType (AsTx AsMaryEra)    (InAnyShelleyBasedEra ShelleyBasedEraMary)
  , FromSomeType (AsTx AsAlonzoEra)  (InAnyShelleyBasedEra ShelleyBasedEraAlonzo)
  , FromSomeType (AsTx AsBabbageEra) (InAnyShelleyBasedEra ShelleyBasedEraBabbage)
  , FromSomeType (AsTx AsConwayEra)  (InAnyShelleyBasedEra ShelleyBasedEraConway)
  ]

Simple Dijkstra transactions still go through, because the Conway decoder happens to accept them. That hides the bug. It shows up as soon as a transaction uses a body field whose encoding changed in Dijkstra. For example, required signers (body field 14) are now encoded as credentials ([0, keyhash]) where Conway expects plain key-hash bytes. Such a transaction is rejected with HTTP 400:

{"contents":{"contents":[
  "DecoderErrorDeserialiseFailure \"Shelley Tx\" (DeserialiseFailure 3 \"expected list len or indef\")",
  "DecoderErrorDeserialiseFailure \"Shelley Tx\" (DeserialiseFailure 3 \"expected list len or indef\")",
  "DecoderErrorDeserialiseFailure \"Shelley Tx\" (DeserialiseFailure 3 \"expected list len or indef\")",
  "DecoderErrorDeserialiseFailure \"Shelley Tx\" (DeserialiseFailure 3 \"expected list len or indef\")",
  "DecoderErrorDeserialiseFailure \"Shelley Tx\" (DeserialiseFailure 3 \"expected list len or indef\")",
  "DecoderErrorDeserialiseFailure \"Shelley Tx\" (DeserialiseFailure 260 \"expected bytes\")"
 ],"tag":"TxCmdTxReadError"},"tag":"TxSubmitFail"}

The same transactions submitted with cardano-cli transaction submit work: valid ones are accepted, and the negative test gets the expected ledger error instead of a decoding failure.

The code is unchanged on master (b05d8ef62), on leios-prototype, and on the 11.2 release prep branch koslambrou/prepare-11.2 (8ff994d2f). The pinned cardano-api (^>= 11.7) already provides AsDijkstraEra / ShelleyBasedEraDijkstra, so only cardano-submit-api needs to change.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Start a local testnet in the Dijkstra era (protocol version 12).
  2. Build and sign a transaction with a required signer, e.g. cardano-cli dijkstra transaction build ... --required-signer-hash <keyhash>.
  3. POST the raw CBOR to /api/submit/tx with Content-Type: application/cbor.
  4. The request fails with the TxCmdTxReadError shown above.

Found by the cardano-node-tests tests test_mint_build.py::test_witness_redeemer[*-submit_api] and test_mint_negative_build.py::test_witness_redeemer_missing_signer[submit_api-*]. All other submit_api tests pass on Dijkstra.

Expected behavior
Dijkstra transactions are decoded and submitted.

System info

  • OS Name: Fedora Linux 44
  • Node version: cardano-node 11.1.0.164 - linux-x86_64 - ghc-9.6, git rev 8bb6b68d80a8a4fb1904c48805be4f3a516593ef
  • CLI version: cardano-cli 11.2.2.0 - linux-x86_64 - ghc-9.6, git rev 8bb6b68d80a8a4fb1904c48805be4f3a516593ef
  • cardano-submit-api 11.0.0 (same build)

Additional context
cardano-cli had the same kind of hardcoded era list when reading transaction witnesses. It was fixed in IntersectMBO/cardano-cli@6605fa151 ("Derive the accepted era list when reading transaction witnesses"), which builds the list from [minBound .. maxBound]. The same approach would work here.

Dominant language
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Merged PRs (30d)
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