Contract to contract communication is an essential part of any fleet on the blockchain. As discussed in the contract lineage section, a complex project on Ethereum should be built using a collection of smaller microservices to keep complexity at bay.

We will also explore a few other features of smart contracts like ownership and events.

Let’s analyze a second contract we’ll call Adjuster which will interface with our Simple contract:

The Adjuster contract has an adjustTo() function that will add to the Simple contract’s count to adjust it to the _target value.

There is also the concept of an owner address. This is set on contract deployment and when adjustTo() is called, we check to make sure the msg.sender is the owner.

There is also an event called Adjusted that is fired when the adjustTo() function makes a change to the count. Events are only visible off-chain but they are very useful for debugging, triggering off-chain actions, and even relatively cheap storage.

We can compile the Adjuster with:

node compile Adjuster

We’ll also need to throw in a dependencies.js to include Simple.sol:

const fs = require('fs');

module.exports = {

'Simple.sol': fs.readFileSync('Simple/Simple.sol', 'utf8')

}

We then deploy the Adjuster with:

node deploy Adjuster

This contract is a little bigger than the last so it was a little more expensive to deploy:

==ETHER COST: 0.005155854000000001 $1.8045489000000006

Adjuster address on Ropsten:

0x34dcf6e1fb7dc453f514a5c4760595af5e2e2ea9

Now let’s write a few scripts to interact with this contract. First, we’ll want a script called getOwner.js to be able to see who the owner is:

module.exports = (contract,params,args)=>{

contract.methods.owner().call().then((owner)=>{

console.log("OWNER:"+owner)

})

} node contract getOwner Adjuster OWNER:0xA3EEBd575245E0bd51aa46B87b1fFc6A1689965a

Looking at our local accounts on the testnet, this is our second account, or index 1:

> eth.accounts ["0x4ffd642a057ce33579a3ca638347b402b909f6d6", "0xa3eebd575245e0bd51aa46b87b1ffc6a1689965a"]

Another script needed is adjustTo.js. This allows us to adjust the Simple contract’s count to a specific number using only the add() function as long as we are the owner of the Adjuster contract.

module.exports = (contract,params,args)=>{

console.log("**== adjusting Simple contract at "+args[5]+" to "+args[6]+" using account "+params.accounts[args[7]])

return contract.methods.adjustTo(args[5],args[6]).send({

from: params.accounts[args[7]],

gas: params.gas,

gasPrice:params.gasPrice

})

}



Let’s go back to the Simple contract function from the previous section to get the current count:

node contract getCount Simple COUNT:0

Now let’s adjust it to 128 using the Simple contract’s address using account index 1 which is the owner of the Adjuster:

node contract adjustTo Adjuster null 0xD68eF7611913d0AfF3627a92F5e502696887D626 128 1

Now if we get a count we’ll see:

COUNT:128

Let’s write a quick script to read events off-chain:

module.exports = (contract,params,args)=>{

contract.getPastEvents('Adjusted', {

fromBlock: params.blockNumber,

toBlock: 'latest'

}, function(error, events){

console.log(events);

})

}

If we run that now, we should see all contract interaction so far:

{

address: '0x34DCF6E1fB7DC453F514a5C4760595af5e2E2Ea9',

transactionHash: '0xcdc8bb4b1fe7267bf4ded620c7501befb749301b7c42a4b1cb3cb5738dad4c13',

returnValues:

Result {

'0': '0xD68eF7611913d0AfF3627a92F5e502696887D626',

'1': '128',

'2': '128',

_contractAddress: '0xD68eF7611913d0AfF3627a92F5e502696887D626',

_target: '128',

_amount: '128'

},

event: 'Adjusted',

signature: '0xafa2c40f4442ec5731ad257412e46d0e88b0d8f8398f575db15a4c9192d19e29' }

We can see that if the original count was 0 and the _target is 128 then the _amount needed to get to the _target is 128.

It’s always good to test every condition exhaustively and try to hit your contract with anything and everything, because a good hacker will do the same. Obviously, security doesn’t really matter with this contract because the Simple contract is already completely open for manipulation, but it helps illustrate simple methods of testing. For production level contracts, along with open sourcing and extensive audits, we will need to have a full suite of tests.

For now, let’s just make sure it overflows correctly when we add() past 255.

node contract adjustTo Adjuster null 0xD68eF7611913d0AfF3627a92F5e502696887D626 16 1 COUNT:16

Let’s also make sure we can’t run the adjustTo() function using a non-owner account. We’ll use account index 0 instead of 1 to simulate a foreign account trying to run the adjustTo() function:

node contract adjustTo Adjuster null 0xD68eF7611913d0AfF3627a92F5e502696887D626 32 0

The count remains:

COUNT:16

One last thing to mention about contract to contract communication is that when one contract accesses a function of another contract, the msg.sender on the accessed contract is that of the accessing contract, not the account triggering the interaction. This means we can code in security where only a particular contract can have permission to run certain functions on another contract. This will be important later.

Note: Along those same lines, DELEGATECALL is an opcode that “propagates the sender and value from the parent scope to the child scope”.

This is an excerpt from the Concurrence Contract To Contract Exploration.

Read more about the Concurrence Oracle network at https://concurrence.io.