How can I encode transaction specific information on the ledger, after it has been made?

Question

Let's say I create invoices which contains consumer products. For each invoice, I create a transaction to the supply account which contains the invoice file hash in the memo. However, when I have already consumed or modified products in the invoice k, I want to save that information on the ledger, so that in the future I know that I'm no longer interested to retrieve that transaction. I want to retrieve only transactions which "contains" invoices with unconsumed products.

How can I realize this on stellar?

Answer 1

The Manage Data Operation can be used to store application-specific information the Stellar ledger. You would then retrieve it via the Data for Account Horizon API.

However, do note that for each data entry you use it will increase the minimum account balance required by 0.5XLM, so it could potentially get expensive if you're adding a new entry for every invoice. Data entries are also limited to only 64 bytes per entry.

Some other people I've talked to have used IPFS in combination with Manage Data to store an IPFS hash in Stellar and the actual data in IPFS. You might consider just storing it in your own database if that is not a workable solution for you.