The State Model - Advanced

This section describes the state model in some detail. This detail may not be necessary for all use cases.

The Babylon state model consists of a forest of state trees.

• At the top of each tree is a global entity - such as an account, resource or package.
• Entities contain modules - for example “Self” for their own state, and “Authorization” for their access rules.
• These modules contain substates which actually store the state.
• … And these substates can then own further internal entities, allowing for layers of recursion.

For example:

• An Account entity has a “Self” module which contains its “component data” substate.
• This component data substate owns an internal key value store entity - which has a self module containing entry substates for each resource owned by the account.
• These entry substates each then own a single internal vault entity for that resource which actually stores its relevant resource.

In general, only global entities can be addressed directly, and internal state is mostly an implementation detail - although the state tree can be queried via the APIs.