Sending EOS and Tokens with eosjs (2/2): Token transfer

The previous post used eosjs’s transfer method to send the native EOS coin. Any “action” on EOS — transfer included — needs two pieces of information:

• The contract account name (for EOS coin: eosio.token)
• The action name defined on that contract (for EOS coin: transfer)

The transfer method we used in the previous post bakes these two values in for you. It’s a convenience that makes sense given EOS is the chain’s native currency and the most-transferred asset.

Tokens are a different story. eosjs has no way to know which contract account a given token lives on, and that contract’s transfer action might not even be named transfer. For those cases, eosjs exposes the lower-level transaction method.

The transaction method

Here’s what a token transfer looks like via transaction. The example uses await so the result is bound to a result variable:

let result = await eos.transaction({
    actions: [{
        account: "lioncontract",
        name: "transfer",
        data: {
            from: "lazylion1234",
            to: "babylion1234",
            quantity: "12.0000 LION",
            memo: "eosjs is quite easy to use!!"
        },
        authorization: [{
            actor: "lazylion1234",
            permission: "active"
        }]
    }]
});

console.log(result.transaction_id); // print the resulting transaction id

• actions: the list of actions to perform. A single transfer action is the typical case for sending a token. The example fires the transfer action on the lioncontract contract.
• actions → account: the contract’s account name.
• actions → name: the action name defined on the contract.
• actions → data: the payload the action expects. Note that lioncontract’s transfer takes the same fields as the native EOS transfer.
• actions → authorization: the permission used to sign this action. Since the sender is lazylion1234, the call needs that account’s active permission.

Inspecting the transaction log

Here’s what calling transaction logs:

eosjs fetches the contract’s ABI, retrieves the current block info, builds the matching transaction, signs it, and pushes it.

That wraps up coin and token transfers with eosjs. The hard parts — assembling the right RPC sequence, signing, broadcasting — collapse into a single call.