Function hdk::entry::hash_entry

pub fn hash_entry<I, E>(input: I) -> ExternResult<EntryHash> where
    Entry: TryFrom<I, Error = E>,
    WasmError: From<E>, 

Hash anything that that implements TryInto<Entry> .

Hashes are typed in holochain, e.g. HeaderHash and EntryHash are different and yield different bytes for a given value. This ensures correctness and allows type based dispatch in various areas of the codebase.

Usually you want to hash a value that you want to reference on the DHT with get etc. because it represents some domain-specific data sourced externally or generated within the wasm. HeaderHash hashes are always generated by the process of committing something to a local chain. Every host function that commits an entry returns the new HeaderHash . The HeaderHash can also be used with get etc. to retreive a specific element from the DHT rather than the oldest live element. However there is no way to generate a header hash directly from a header from inside wasm. Element values (entry+header pairs returned by get etc.) contain prehashed header structs called HeaderHashed , which is composed of a HeaderHash alongside the “raw” Header value. Generally the pre-hashing is more efficient than hashing headers ad-hoc as hashing always needs to be done at the database layer, so we want to re-use that as much as possible. The header hash can be extracted from the Element as element.header_hashed().as_hash(). @todo is there any use-case that can’t be satisfied by the header_hashed approach?

Anything that is annotated with #[hdk_entry( .. )] or entry_def!( .. ) implements this so is compatible automatically.

hash_entry is “dumb” in that it doesn’t check that the entry is defined, committed, on the DHT or any other validation, it simply generates the hash for the serialized representation of something in the same way that the DHT would.

It is strongly recommended that you use the hash_entry function to calculate hashes to avoid inconsistencies between hashes in the wasm guest and the host. For example, a lot of the crypto crates in rust compile to wasm so in theory could generate the hash in the guest, but there is the potential that the serialization logic could be slightly different, etc.

#[hdk_entry(id="foo")]
struct Foo;

let foo_hash = hash_entry(Foo)?;