Accessibility of functions inside custom pallet

Question

I have two custom pallets pallet1 and pallet2. In pallet1 I have a bunch of calls with assigned weights declared under pallet call macro like this

#[pallet::call]
impl<T: Config> Pallet<T> {
  dispatchables
}

In pallet1 I also have a bunch of public helper functions outside of call macro, they are at the bottom of my pallets code

impl<T: Config> Pallet<T> {
  pub fn do_things(args) -> DispatchResult {}
}

Now pallet2 can call these helper functions from pallet1 through coupling mechanism

pallet1::Pallet::<T>::do_things(args)

Is there a way to call these functions externally/directly by submitting some extrinsic or other means like state_call rpc or something or the only way to invoke them outside pallet1 is hardcoding calls to these functions in other custom pallets

Answer 1

To answer the question of "Do I need to worry about access control for do_things if other pallets can call it?", the answer is no, you don't need to worry. Even though it is accessible from other pallets, only the one deploying an appchain or parachain can choose which pallets exist and what they do. As long as you make sure that there are appropriate access control checks whenever an extrinsic causes pallet2 to call pallet1::do_things, you'll be fine.

For these public non-extrinsic functions to be executed, they need to be a side effect of someone submitting an extrinsic to one of the pallets running in your chain.

In general, for functions that change things to be accessible externally, they need to be caused by an extrinsic. So if this function changes any state, it can't meaningfully be called via RPC alone.

Answer 2

Not sure if this what you are looking for, but you could have a higher abstraction for your do_things, a DoThings trait. Your pallet2 via Config will depend from a higher abstraction DoThings.

Example: Preimage type of Scheduler's pallet config, it is defined as a type requiring QueryPreimage and StorePreimage traits, and one of the implementations of these traits is Preimage pallet.

https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/blob/e2c5a564e5a83e1f63d47a4fa300567901f00afc/frame/scheduler/src/lib.rs#L230