Replicating onchain state

This guide walks through how you might recreate onchain state from MUD's Store events. We use this pattern in our sync stack to hydrate a client or indexer from blockchain logs fetched from an RPC.

Store: MUD's onchain storage

Before we get started, it's helpful to understand how MUD stores its data on chain. MUD introduces a few new concepts: tables, records, key tuples, and fields.

You can think of tables like a native Solidity mapping, where its keys and values are encoded in a standardized way to 1) more easily replicate and represent data offchain, like in relational databases, and 2) require less onchain storage and gas than native Solidity.

Internally, MUD stores static (fixed-length) field values separately from dynamic (variable-length) field values. You'll see this distinction expressed in the events below.

Store protocol events

MUD emits the following events for its onchain storage operations:

event Store_SetRecord(bytes32 indexed tableId, bytes32[] keyTuple, bytes staticData, bytes32 encodedLengths, bytes dynamicData)
event Store_SpliceStaticData(bytes32 indexed tableId, bytes32[] keyTuple, uint48 start, bytes data)
event Store_SpliceDynamicData(bytes32 indexed tableId, bytes32[] keyTuple, uint8 dynamicFieldIndex, uint48 start, uint40 deleteCount, bytes32 encodedLengths, bytes data)
event Store_DeleteRecord(bytes32 indexed tableId, bytes32[] keyTuple)

Store_SetRecord sets the entire record value (all fields) for a particular key tuple in a particular table.
Store_SpliceStaticData modifies a subset of the bytes that represents the encoded values of all static (fixed length) fields for a particular key tuple in a particular table.
Store_SpliceDynamicData modifies a subset of the bytes that represents the encoded values of all dynamic (variable length) fields for a particular key tuple in a particular table. Because dynamic fields need to additionally keep track of lengths, it has a few more arguments than the static splice event.
Store_DeleteRecord removes the entire record at a particular key tuple in a particular table.

Recreating onchain state

We'll use TypeScript to prototype an in-memory representation of a Store's onchain bytes. We'll use the emitted event logs above to reconstruct this state. To make our life easier, we'll start with a little boilerplate.

type Hex = `0x${string}`;
 
type Record = {
  staticData: Hex;
  encodedLengths: Hex;
  dynamicData: Hex;
};
 
const store = new Map<string, Record>();
 
// Create a key string from a table ID and key tuple to use in our store Map above
function storeKey(tableId: Hex, keyTuple: Hex[]): string {
  return `${tableId}:${keyTuple.join(",")}`;
}
 
// Like `Array.splice`, but for strings of bytes
function bytesSplice(data: Hex, start: number, deleteCount = 0, newData: Hex = "0x"): Hex {
  const dataNibbles = data.replace(/^0x/, "").split("");
  const newDataNibbles = newData.replace(/^0x/, "").split("");
  return `0x${dataNibbles
    .splice(start, deleteCount * 2)
    .concat(newDataNibbles)
    .join("")}`;
}
 
function bytesLength(data: Hex): number {
  return data.replace(/^0x/, "").length / 2;
}

Let's assume we're iterating over the event logs for a given block. We'll write a condition for each event type.

Setting a record is easy, because we can just replace the entire record with the arguments from the event log.

if (log.eventName === "Store_SetRecord") {
  const key = storeKey(log.args.tableId, log.args.keyTuple);
  store.set(key, {
    staticData: log.args.staticData,
    encodedLengths: log.args.encodedLengths,
    dynamicData: log.args.dynamicData,
  });
}

Likewise, deleting a record is straightforward.

if (log.eventName === "Store_DeleteRecord") {
  const key = storeKey(log.args.tableId, log.args.keyTuple);
  store.delete(key);
}

The splice events are modeled after JavaScript's Array.splice and we can use our bytesSplice method to help us modify the record.

if (log.eventName === "Store_SpliceStaticData") {
  const key = storeKey(log.args.tableId, log.args.keyTuple);
  const record = store.get(key) ?? { staticData: "0x", encodedLengths: "0x", dynamicData: "0x" };
  store.set(key, {
    staticData: bytesSplice(record.staticData, log.args.start, bytesLength(log.args.data), log.args.data),
    encodedLengths: record.encodedLengths,
    dynamicData: record.dynamicData,
  });
}

Splicing dynamic data is roughly the same.

if (log.eventName === "Store_SpliceDynamicData") {
  const key = storeKey(log.args.tableId, log.args.keyTuple);
  const record = store.get(key) ?? { staticData: "0x", encodedLengths: "0x", dynamicData: "0x" };
  store.set(key, {
    staticData: record.staticData,
    encodedLengths: log.args.encodedLengths,
    dynamicData: bytesSplice(record.dynamicData, log.args.start, log.args.deleteCount, log.args.data),
  });
}

And that's it! We've got our onchain state represented in TypeScript, reconstructed via MUD's Store event logs.

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