Documentation doesn't explain accepted contract method "overrides"

The documentation for Contract interaction indicates that an optional overrides can be provided to contract method calls. There is no explanation for what these overrides are, or which ones are supported.

Digging through other issues I find reference to some of these overrides, but without a formal list, a user has no idea what is supported.

For instance I am trying to get blockNumber to work, however there is no documentation telling me how to do this.

Link to documentation that is missing explanation: https://docs.ethers.io/v5/api/contract/contract/#Contract-functionsCall

[mudgen]

@ricmoo Thank you for adding the documentation!

[ricmoo]

Sorry Holidays we’re far busier than I expected. I’ve been working on it, it just isn’t published yet.

I’ll give a quick overview here, but there are nuances I need to double check, so there may be some inaccuracies.

Yes, you can pass blockNumber in as an override for constant functions, and function on the callStatic bucket and the populateTransaction bucket. But, not all backends support this; Etherscan does not allow block tags to call or estimateGas, INFURA only allows it for their paid tier, on Alchemy it will chew up your compute credits faster and if you are connecting to Geth or Parity, your node must be syncing in Archive mode. For nodes in archive mode, there is also a configurable depth which is how far back in time to maintain the archive-ness; in this case your blockNumber must be within its safe range.

Does that all make sense? I’ll be experimenting today and hopefully get the new flatworm version out along with the documentation updates. 😃