[FR] - make `transaction build` to balance automatically also the multi-assets

[dorin100]

Internal/External
Internal if an IOHK staff member.

Area
Native Tokens Related to Native Tokens (Mary).
Plutus Related to Plutus Scripts (Alonzo).

Describe the feature you'd like
make transaction build to balance automatically also the multi-assets, not only the Lovelace UTXOs

[kieransimkin]

I would argue that this is not a feature enhancement, but a bug - I can't find any logical justification for why it would automatically balance ADA but not non-Ada tokens? It just means code that works with UTXOs containing only ADA inexplicably breaks for UTXOs containing non-Ada tokens. Really not expected behaviour at all. If you have left-over tokens of any kind, they should be outputted back to the change address, what is the justification for not doing this?

[mateusap1]

Any updates? I think at least adding an option is a good idea

[dorin100]

cc @vfrsilva

[kieransimkin]

Any updates? I think at least adding an option is a good idea

Apparently the core dev team at IOG have absolutely no interest in making life easier for us developers, or even explaining the rationale behind their dodgy decisions. This is the 2nd or 3rd ticket I've raised over an silly issue like this which is causing unnecessary confusion and roadblocks to new Cardano developers. Every time I raise an issue, I either get ignored, or I get push back - took months to make any progress on the incompatibility between Serialization-lib and Cardano-CLI transactions - I suspect because dev team bury their heads in the sand.

Honestly, I like Cardano, I think it's a good system with a good community, and I'm personally very heavily invested it in it, but the process of developing for Cardano is way harder than it needs to be, and IOG needs to pull their fingers out, start listening to your developers, respond to them and try to make the platform easier to develop on - Cardano will lose to other cryptos if this doesn't happen, that is already happening.

Why develop for a platform that's harder than others, written in a language nobody knows (Haskell) and with a core development team who seem to have no interest in making life easier for their development community?

[larestrepo]

I just hit this issue, is there any workaround? change-address should handle the balance to both ADA and non-ADA assets.

[jterrier84]

Same problem here. Any final solution or workaround available?

[marijanp]

What errors are you all getting and what version of cardano-node/-cli are you using? For me the balancing of non-Ada values works.

[jterrier84]

I get this error:
Command failed: transaction build Error: Non-Ada assets are unbalanced: 1354601 lovelace + 5000000000 afc910d7a306d20c12903979d4935ae4307241d03245743548e76783.4153484942 + 1 f0ff48bbb7bbe9d59a40f1ce90e9e9d0ff5002ec48f232b49ca0fb9a.6d696e6931706f6f6c

My cardano-cli version:
cardano-cli 1.34.1 - linux-aarch64 - ghc-8.10