Writing the state

In Corda, shared facts on the blockchain are represented as states. Our first task will be to define a new state type to represent an IOU.

The ContractState interface

A Corda state is any instance of a class that implements the ContractState interface. The ContractState interface is defined as follows:

interface ContractState {
    // The list of entities considered to have a stake in this state.
    val participants: List<AbstractParty>
}

We can see that the ContractState interface has a single field, participants. participants is a list of the entities for which this state is relevant.

Beyond this, our state is free to define any fields, methods, helpers or inner classes it requires to accurately represent a given type of shared fact on the blockchain.

Note

The first thing you'll probably notice about the declaration of ContractState is that its not written in Java or another common language. The core Corda platform, including the interface declaration above, is entirely written in Kotlin.

Learning some Kotlin will be very useful for understanding how Corda works internally, and usually only takes an experienced Java developer a day or so to pick up. However, learning Kotlin isn't essential. Because Kotlin code compiles to JVM bytecode, CorDapps written in other JVM languages such as Java can interoperate with Corda.

If you do want to dive into Kotlin, there's an official getting started guide, and a series of Kotlin Koans.

Modelling IOUs

How should we define the IOUState representing IOUs on the blockchain? Beyond implementing the ContractState interface, our IOUState will also need properties to track the relevant features of the IOU:

The value of the IOU
The lender of the IOU
The borrower of the IOU

There are many more fields you could include, such as the IOU's currency, but let's ignore those for now. Adding them later is often as simple as adding an additional property to your class definition.

Defining IOUState

Let's get started by opening TemplateState.java (for Java) or TemplateState.kt (for Kotlin) and updating TemplateState to define an IOUState:

example-code/src/main/kotlin/net/corda/docs/kotlin/tutorial/helloworld/IOUState.kt

example-code/src/main/java/net/corda/docs/java/tutorial/helloworld/IOUState.java

If you're following along in Java, you'll also need to rename TemplateState.java to IOUState.java.

To define IOUState, we've made the following changes:

We've renamed the TemplateState class to IOUState
We've added properties for value, lender and borrower, along with the required getters and setters in Java:
- value is of type int (in Java)/Int (in Kotlin)
- lender and borrower are of type Party
  - Party is a built-in Corda type that represents an entity on the network
We've overridden participants to return a list of the lender and borrower
- participants is a list of all the parties who should be notified of the creation or consumption of this state

The IOUs that we issue onto a ledger will simply be instances of this class.

Progress so far

We've defined an IOUState that can be used to represent IOUs as shared facts on a ledger. As we've seen, states in Corda are simply classes that implement the ContractState interface. They can have any additional properties and methods you like.

All that's left to do is write the IOUFlow that will allow a node to orchestrate the creation of a new IOUState on the blockchain, while only sharing information on a need-to-know basis.

What about the contract?

If you've read the white paper or Key Concepts section, you'll know that each state has an associated contract that imposes invariants on how the state evolves over time. Including a contract isn't crucial for our first CorDapp, so we'll just use the empty TemplateContract and TemplateContract.Commands.Action command defined by the template for now. In the next tutorial, we'll implement our own contract and command.

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