Calling a payable method using near-api-js when the current access key has low allowance

Question

I have a NEAR application in which most of the methods do not transfer any tokens. Users go through the standard login flow with NEAR wallet, have their 0.25N allowance for gas, and then interact with the application.

I now have a new end-point that I want to be callable from the front-end, which expects the user to pay an amount significantly exceeding 0.25N:

    #[payable]
    pub fn buy_stuff() {

When I use the standard near-api-js way to call it:

window.contract.buy_stuff({}, undefined, price).then(m => window.location.href='/');

it fails, because it tries to spend the price from the allowance of the aceess key logged in, which it doesn't have -- it naturally only has 0.25N it has for gas.

The specific error is "Access Key {account_id}:{public_key} does not have enough balance 247864837491516400000000 for transaction costing 5004231023352653388973496"

What I want instead is to get the user redirected to the wallet, and authorize this particular transaction using their full access key in the wallet. Is there a way to do that with near-api-js?

Answer 1

It looks like the issue is that the contract API doesn't consider a wallet redirect. One reason might be the initialization of the contract API.

In order for a contract API to be able to redirect to a wallet, the initialization should be done with the ConnectedWalletAccount. It can be done using the following code:

const nearConnection = await nearAPI.connect(...);

const walletConnection = new nearAPI.WalletConnection(
  nearConnection,
  ContractName
);

const contract = new nearAPI.Contract(
  walletConnection.account(),
  ContractName,
  {
    viewMethods: [...],
    changeMethods: [...],
  }
);