Automating the Upgrade Process

In this section, we are going to automate the upgrade of our carbon certificate process using Daml Script and Daml Triggers. Note that automation for upgrades is specific to an individual application, just like the upgrade models. Nevertheless, we have found that the pattern shown here occurs frequently.

Structuring the Upgrade

There are three kinds of actions performed during the upgrade:

  1. Alice creates UpgradeCarbonCertProposal contracts. We assume here, that Alice wants to upgrade all CarbonCert contracts she has issued. Since the UpgradeCarbonCertProposal proposal is specific to each owner, Alice has to create one UpgradeCarbonCertProposal per owner. There can be potentially many owners but this step only has to be performed once assuming Alice will not issue more CarbonCert contracts after this point.
  2. Bob and other owners accept the UpgradeCarbonCertProposal. To keep this example simple, we assume that there are only carbon certificates issued by Alice. Therefore, each owner has to accept at most one proposal.
  3. As owners accept upgrade proposals, Alice has to upgrade each certificate. This means that she has to execute the upgrade choice once for each certificate. Owners will not all accept the upgrade at the same time and some might never accept it. Therefore, this should be a long-running process that upgrades all carbon certificates of a given owner as soon as they accept the upgrade.

Given those constraints, we are going to use the following tools for the upgrade:

  1. A Daml script that will be executed once by Alice and creates an UpgradeCarbonCertProposal contract for each owner.
  2. Navigator to accept the UpgradeCarbonCertProposal as Bob. While we could also use a Daml script to accept the proposal, this step will often be exposed as part of a web UI so doing it interactively in Navigator resembles that workflow more closely.
  3. A long-running Daml trigger that upgrades all CarbonCert contracts for which there is a corresponding UpgradeCarbonCertAgreement.

Implementation of the Daml Script

In our Daml Script, we are first going to query the ACS (Active Contract Set) to find all CarbonCert contracts issued by us. Next, we are going to extract the owner of each of those contracts and remove any duplicates coming from multiple certificates issued to the same owner. Finally, we iterate over the owners and create an UpgradeCarbonCertAgreement contract for each owner.

initiateUpgrade : Setup.Parties -> Script ()
initiateUpgrade Setup.Parties{alice} = do
  certs <- query @CarbonCert alice
  let myCerts = filter (\(_cid, c) -> c.issuer == alice) certs
  let owners = dedup $ map (\(_cid, c) -> c.owner) myCerts
  forA_ owners $ \owner -> do
    debugRaw ("Creating upgrade proposal for: " <> show owner)
    submit alice $ createCmd (UpgradeCarbonCertProposal alice owner)

Implementation of the Daml Trigger

Our trigger does not need any custom user state and no heartbeat so the only interesting field in its definition is the rule.

upgradeTrigger : Trigger ()
upgradeTrigger = Trigger with
  initialize = pure ()
  updateState = \_msg -> pure ()
  registeredTemplates = AllInDar
  heartbeat = None
  rule = triggerRule

In our rule, we first filter out all agreements and certificates issued by us. Next, we iterate over all agreements. For each agreement we filter the certificates by the owner of the agreement and finally upgrade the certificate by exercising the Upgrade choice. We mark the certificate as pending which temporarily removes it from the ACS and therefore stops the trigger from trying to upgrade the same certificate multiple times if the rule is triggered in quick succession.

triggerRule : Party -> TriggerA () ()
triggerRule issuer = do
  agreements <-
    filter (\(_cid, agreement) -> agreement.issuer == issuer) <$>
    query @UpgradeCarbonCertAgreement
  allCerts <-
    filter (\(_cid, cert) -> cert.issuer == issuer) <$>
    query @CarbonCert
  forA_ agreements $ \(agreementCid, agreement) -> do
    let certsForOwner = filter (\(_cid, cert) -> cert.owner == agreement.owner) allCerts
    forA_ certsForOwner $ \(certCid, _) ->
      emitCommands
        [exerciseCmd agreementCid (Upgrade certCid)]
        [toAnyContractId certCid]

The trigger is a long-running process and the rule will be executed whenever the state of the ledger changes. So whenever an owner accepts an upgrade proposal, the trigger will run the rule and upgrade all certificates of that owner.

Deploying and Executing the Upgrade

Now that we defined our Daml script and our trigger, it is time to use them! If you still have Sandbox running from the previous section, stop it to clear out all data before continuing.

First, we start sandbox passing in the carbon-upgrade DAR. Since a DAR includes all transitive dependencies, this includes carbon-1.0.0 and carbon-2.0.0.

$ cd example/carbon-upgrade
$ daml sandbox --dar .daml/dist/carbon-upgrade-1.0.0.dar

To simplify the setup here, we use a Daml script to create 3 parties Alice, Bob and Charlie and two CarbonCert contracts issues by Alice, one owned by Bob and one owned by Charlie. This Daml script reuses the Setup.setup Daml script from the previous section to create the parties & users.

setup : Script Setup.Parties
setup = do
  parties@Setup.Parties{..} <- Setup.setup
  bobProposal <- submit alice $ createCmd (CarbonCertProposal alice bob 10)
  submit bob $ exerciseCmd bobProposal CarbonCertProposal_Accept
  charlieProposal <- submit alice $ createCmd (CarbonCertProposal alice charlie 5)
  submit charlie $ exerciseCmd charlieProposal CarbonCertProposal_Accept
  pure parties

Run the script as follows:

$ cd example/carbon-initiate-upgrade
$ daml build
$ daml script --dar=.daml/dist/carbon-initiate-upgrade-1.0.0.dar --script-name=InitiateUpgrade:setup --ledger-host=localhost --ledger-port=6865 --output-file parties.json

As before, parties.json contains the actual party ids we can use later.

If you now start Navigator from the carbon-initiate-upgrade directory and log in as alice, you can see the two CarbonCert contracts.

Next, we run the trigger for Alice. The trigger will keep running throughout the rest of this example.

$ cd example/carbon-upgrade-trigger
$ daml build
$ daml trigger --dar=.daml/dist/carbon-upgrade-trigger-1.0.0.dar --trigger-name=UpgradeTrigger:upgradeTrigger --ledger-host=localhost --ledger-port=6865 --ledger-user=alice

With the trigger running, we can now run the script to create the UpgradeCarbonCertProposal contracts (we could also have done that before starting the trigger). The script takes an argument of type Parties corresponding to the result of the previous setup script. We can pass this in via the --input-file argument.

$ cd example/carbon-initiate-upgrade
$ daml build
$ daml script --dar=.daml/dist/carbon-initiate-upgrade-1.0.0.dar --script-name=InitiateUpgrade:initiateUpgrade --ledger-host=localhost --ledger-port=6865 --input-file=parties.json

At this point, our trigger is running and the UpgradeCarbonCertProposal contracts for Bob and Charlie have been created. What is left to do is to accept the proposals. Our trigger will then automatically pick them up and upgrade the CarbonCert contracts.

First, start Navigator and log in as bob. Click on the UpgradeCarbonCertProposal and accept it. If you now go back to the contracts tab, you can see that the CarbonCert contract has been archived and instead there is a new CarbonCertWithMethod upgrade. Our trigger has successfully upgraded the CarbonCert!

Next, log in as charlie and accept the UpgradeCarbonCertProposal. Just like for Bob, you can see that the CarbonCert contract has been archived and instead there is a new CarbonCertWithMethod contract.

Since we upgraded all CarbonCert contracts issued by Alice, we can now stop the trigger and declare the update successful.