Can I read information stored by a PDA without having to deserialize its byte array?

Question

here is my on-chain code to create the PDA account

#[derive(Accounts)]
pub struct Initialize<'info>  {
    #[account(init, payer = user, space = 20 , seeds = [user.key().as_ref()], bump)] 
    pub pda: Account<'info, MyData>,
    #[account(mut)]
    pub user: Signer<'info>,
    pub system_program: Program<'info, System>,
}

the data inside:

#[derive(Clone, AnchorSerialize, AnchorDeserialize)]
pub struct MyData {
    pub userkey = Pubkey,
}

In my rust client code, can I get the data for "userkey" without deserializing? right now I'm doing

 let account = connection.get_account(*PDA ADDRESS*).unwrap();
 let data = &account.data;
 let stored_key: String = Pubkey::new_from_array(data[10..42].try_into().unwrap()).to_string();

which is honestly super tedious and if I were to add more fields, id have to find the exact spot of the byte array again :(

I know that there is a .fetch() in javascript that lets me do this: let acc_info = await program.account.myData.fetch(PDA); and then I can just get acc_info.userkey;. is there a similar function in anchor_client?

Answer 1

You should be able to get any account and deserialise it using the client:

let program = client.program(*Program Address*);
let my_data: MyData = program.account(*PDA ADDRESS*)?;

You can see similar examples in the Anchor repo.