IOTA Resource Locator (IOTA implementation of a Chain Agnostic Resource Locator)

Abstract

An Iota Resource Locator (IRL) is a URL-like address that is used to reference resources on an IOTA Network.

Specification

An IRL is a URL-like address comprised of an IOTA Chain ID and a relative URL (a regular URL but limited to path, query, and fragment components), where the first path segment MUST be an IOTA object ID canonically encoded as a 64 lowercase-hex characters preceded by the "0x" prefix.

Here are some examples:

iota:mainnet/0x215e1425343e20fc69c8bacd5e783d3b3c81e3c86408b9b8357247860d0a376d
iota:0e5bfb23/0x8357247860d0a376d215e1425343e20fc69c8bacd5e783d3b3c81e3c86408b9b/state/data

Resolution

The process of resolving an IRL - or dereferencing it - results in the JSON value whose location is specified by the IRL itself.

To resolve an IRL one has to interact with the RPC of any of the nodes of the corresponding IOTA network. Once the RPC endpoint has been established, the iota_getObject RPC method can be invoked, passing the IRL's object ID as its parameter, making sure to enable the object's content in the response. Here is a sample JSON RPC request:

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "method": "iota_getObject",
  "params": [
    "0x53e4567ccafa5f36ce84c80aa8bc9be64e0d5ae796884274aef3005ae6733809",
    {
      "showContent": true,
    }
  ]
}

That yields the following response:

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "result": {
    "data": {
      "objectId": "0x53e4567ccafa5f36ce84c80aa8bc9be64e0d5ae796884274aef3005ae6733809",
      "version": "1",
      "content": {
        "dataType": "moveObject",
        "type": "0x2::coin::Coin<0x2::iota::IOTA>",
        "fields": {
          "balance": "100000000",
          "id": {
            "id": "0x53e4567ccafa5f36ce84c80aa8bc9be64e0d5ae796884274aef3005ae6733809"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

A resolver is only interested in the fields object; if the IRL contains an empty path

• besides the object ID - the resolver should return it as the resolution result. Otherwise, if the path is not empty, it should be split into path segments, which are used to traverse the fields object, segment by segment. When taking a step in the traversal of the object, if the current segment isn't found among the object's properties the segment must be searched within the object's fields property, if any. Furthermore, when the entire path has been traversed, if the resulting object has a fields property its value is returned instead of the object itself.

For Instance, the result of resolving iota:mainnet/0x53e4567ccafa5f36ce84c80aa8bc9be64e0d5ae796884274aef3005ae6733809 is the JSON object:

{
  "balance": "100000000",
  "id": {
    "id": "0x53e4567ccafa5f36ce84c80aa8bc9be64e0d5ae796884274aef3005ae6733809"
  }
}

whereas, the result of resolving iota:mainnet/0x53e4567ccafa5f36ce84c80aa8bc9be64e0d5ae796884274aef3005ae6733809/balance is: "100000000".

Implementations

The iota-caip Rust library provides, through the features iota and resolver, an implementation for this specification as well as a resolver for IRLs.