Part 4: bonus - how to call manually

So if you didn't want to use the AutoStation UI, and instead wanted to use AutoStation manually for whatever reason, you'd need to make a request on Autonomy that asks it to call the FundsRouter, and in turn ask that to call whatever condition/action contracts you want to use. In this example, we'll increment a variable, x, in a contract called MockTarget (a contract that's just for the purposes of demoing/testing AutoStation, where the relevant function here is incrementX) every 5 minutes. We'll use Brownie for this, partly because I used it for testing these contracts in the first place and I procrastinated making this tutorial until the day before the ETHBogota hackathon, and partly because it's way better than Truffle (Python gang let's goo!) and all the cool kids use it now, trust me.

Since we need to ask the Registry to ask the Router to call some functions in TimeConditions and MockTarget, it means we need to work backwards from that flow - we need to get the calldata for the calls to everyTimePeriod and incrementX, then get the calldata for forwardCalls in the FundsRouter which includes the calldata for everyTimePeriod and incrementX, then use that as an input to newReq in the `Registry` which actually makes the request - kind of like layers of an onion wrapping eachother.

1.

First, for some context, this is the interface for forwardCalls in FundsRouter.

Notice that fcnData is in the format of a FcnData struct (cause we're great at naming things). This struct is:

So we need to use a tuple/array of this info when gathering the info about each call and putting it into the fcnData array. We can put either the condition or the action first in fcnData and it'll operate in the exact same way regardless of the ordering here, let's do the condition first:

Here, tc is a contract object in Brownie/Web3.py that can be called like tc.fcn to call a function called fcn, or tc.address to get the address of the specific contract. I omitted some variable instantiation/setup for brevity since it's unrelated to the point of this tutorial - you're welcome to read the tests for the full picture here. The 1st element in the tuple is the contract address being called (tc.address). The 2nd element is the calldata for the everyTimePeriod function - we need to put the first argument as the user's address (here, user_a is the address making the request), and we'll use a callId of 1. We'll use a start time of right now, and a period of 5 minutes. So this request should be executed immediately by Autonomy and then every 5 minutes after. Since we don't want to send ETH along with the call, we put the 3rd element in the tuple as 0. The 4th element is true because we want to first argument of the calldata to be verified by FundsRouter so that everyTimePeriod knows it can trust it and use that info to distinguish between different requests.

2.

Now we need to do the same for incrementX in MockTarget.

Similarly to tc, mock_target is a contract object for the MockTarget contract. The 1st element is the address of MockTarget. The 2nd element is the calldata for incrementX, which doesn't have any arguments. The 3rd element is 0 again because we don't want to send any ETH when calling incrementX. The 4th element is now False because we don't want the first argument of incrementX to be forced to be the requester's address (and it wouldn't make sense to want to here anyway since there aren't any arguments so it would be an invalid request).

3.

Now we have everything we need to call forwardCalls in FundsRouter - we need to get the calldata for calling forwardCalls which includes tc_fcn_data and mock_target_fcn_data we generated earlier:

Again the 1st argument of forwardCalls is the user's address, since forwardCalls needs to know it so it knows which user's deposit to deduct the execution fee from. The 2nd argument is the amount of execution fees (in ETH) the user needs to pay to the Autonomy Registry. Since this input is replaced in the Registry before making the call to forwardCalls, it doesn't matter what we put here, so we can just put 0. The 3rd argument is ofcourse all the info about what contracts/functions needs to be called, and is the data we generated earlier put into an array.

4.

Finally, we can make the request to Autonomy!

newReq is the main function in the Autonomy Registry for creating a new request. In the 1st argument, fr is the FundsRouter contract object and so this is the address of it, since we're asking the Registry to call it with the fcn calldata we specify in the 3rd argument. In the 2nd argument, this is the referrer - it's unrelated and can just be left as 0x00...00. The 3rd argument is the calldata for the forwardCalls function we generated earlier. The 4rd argument is 0 since we don't want to send any ETH along with the request. The 5th argument, verifyUser is True since we want to enforce that the 1st argument of the function we're automating (forwardCalls) is the user's address. The 6th argument, insertFeeAmount, is True since we want the Registry to replace the 2nd argument to forwardCalls with the amount of fees that it (and therefore the user using FundsRouter) needs to pay for the execution each time. The 7th argument, isAlive, is True because we want this automation to be recurring, not just execute once.

And that's it! Clear as mud. Now you can manually automate anything your little heart dreams - not sure why you'd want to do it without the UI, but hey, you do you, ser!