Triggering User Defined Jobs On-Chain

Question

I have been working on this dapp lately that allow users to create a product with an expiration date (don't mind the specifics of the app). Once expired, a call to a smart contract should be made (transaction) and the product state should be changed to "expired". The question is - how to manage this task scheduling? I thought about building a mechanism on my own using smart contracts and off-chain services (similar to how Chainlink's model works) but I keep stumbling upon the gas fees require to trigger my contract on expiration. I also tried to figure out Chainlink's Automation but:

1. They don't have mocks to test locally
2. They offer a UI to register the "Upkeep" (their brand for the scheduled job) while I need to do it programmatically.

Please advice.

P.S: I could do all of this off-chain using microservices and regular databases, but obviously this misses the whole point

Answer 1

@eyalmen, np happy to help.

For programmatically registering an "upkeep" check out these docs https://docs.chain.link/chainlink-automation/register-upkeep#register-an-upkeep-using-your-own-deployed-contract

does that do the trick for you?

And instead of mocking the contract, in your tests you can directly test the behaviour of your smart contract (rather than the entire networks interaction) by just

1. calling checkUpkeep on your consumer contract programmaticly
2. calling performUppeep and optionally passing in performData if any or 0x if not.

Thats how you'd simulate that your contract behaves correctly when automation runs on it. That way you're testing your code behaviour directly.