How to decode ink smart contract call and event data?

Question

I want to decode the contract call data and event data saved in a block. How can I do that?

Answer 1

Having this data in hex format, you can decode it using cargo-contract command line utility simply like this (run from the contract src folder):

cargo contract decode -d <data_hex_string> -t message 

You can decode event and constructor data in the same way by running it with -t event and -t constructor accordingly.

Answer 2

Typically all data is SCALE encoded for Substrate. You need to decode and parse the result into something human readable, like is done on the contracts-ui from the contracts-ui github and documented in the polkadot-js contracts docs