Type for getTransaction misses `| null`

Ok, so first of all, I found this due to a programming error so probably not an issue that happens for a lot of people, but types could have caught this.

• provider.getTransaction returns Promise<TransactionResponse>
• but call this function with a transaction has from e.g. a different chain or a dropped transaction, JSON RPC returns null
• Ethers (v5) passes along this null while the types think it is a TransactionResponse and do not complain about accessing tx.data for example

Example call in JSON RPC which triggers this in ethers:

curl -X POST --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_getTransactionByHash","params":["0xa52be92809541220ee0aaaede6047d9a6c5d0cd96a517c854d944ee70a0ebb44"],"id":53}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" https://mintnet.settlemint.com

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":null,"id":53}

Maybe this is client/version specific so for reference this is a Parity Aura network running 2.5.5

[phiresky]

Unfortunately adding | null will break all typescript uses of getTransaction, since everything then needs a check if it is not null.

Code that uses getTransaction has to check for null since it will otherwise crash for dropped transactions. Existing code that does not do this is wrong, I was just bitten by this. Correcting the TypeScript types is not a breaking change, it’s a bug fix

[ricmoo]

That should be fine. I don’t see any issue with using that to isolate it to your own project. 😃