Building an SDK 0.1.14 – Adding a Contracts module

Intro

The idea of adding this was to make accessing Balancer contracts easier for users. Normally you need to find and import ABIs and deal with deployment addresses, if we want to make it easy we should just remove that complexity.

Also we are trying to make the main SDK functions return the contract name and functions as part of the attributes returned. This means the user could then just call using something like:

const { contractName, functionName, attributes } = transactionAttributes;

sdk.contracts[contractName][functionName](attributes)

Typechain

Typechain is a package that provides TypeScript bindings for Ethereum contracts. This means functions are statically typed and there is also IDE support which makes things safer and easier to develop against.

Balancer has its own @balancer-labs/typechain package that exposes instances of the commononly used contracts. Adding this to the SDK means we can remove the need to import ABI jsons and we can now create instances of contracts by doing:

import {
    Vault__factory
} from '@balancer-labs/typechain';

Vault__factory.connect(
            this.networkConfig.addresses.contracts.vault,
            provider
        );

which will return a typed Vault contract.

Module

• Uses BALANCER_NETWORK_CONFIG and config.network to find vault/lidoRelayer/multicall addresses.
• Added contracts getter to SDK module:

constructor(
        public config: BalancerSdkConfig,
        public sor = new Sor(config),
        public subgraph = new Subgraph(config),
        public pools = new Pools(config),
        public balancerContracts = new Contracts(config, sor.provider)
    ) { ... }

get contracts(): ContractInstances {
        return this.balancerContracts.contracts;
    }

This can then be called like:

const vaultContract = balancer.contracts['vault'];

or:

const vaultContract = balancer.contracts.vault

which will provide typed function refs.

Tradeoffs

One interesting discussion is the trade off of using the Contracts module within other modules. As of now only the Swaps and Multicaller modules using contracts. Using the Contracts module means we either have to pass Contracts in constructor, which adds an extra step if someone want to use modules independently:

const contracts = new Contracts(config)
const swaps = new Swaps(config, contracts)

or we instantiate Contracts within the module – which ends up happening twice if we use the high level SDK function as it is also instantiated there. For now we have decided to use the Typechain factories to instantiate the contracts within the module and will revisit in future if needed.

Photo by Pablo Arroyo on Unsplash