Contract State

Let's take a look at the struct that defines the contract:

#[near_bindgen]
#[derive(BorshDeserialize, BorshSerialize)]
pub struct StatusMessage {
    records: LookupMap<AccountId, String>,
}

This struct has one field records; a LookupMap that maps AccountIds to Strings.

You will also notice that this contract doesn't implement Default. This is because we are going to implement it ourselves!

impl Default for StatusMessage {
    fn default() -> Self {
        Self {
            records: LookupMap::new(b"r"),
        }
    }
}

This is how you create an implementation that fulfills a trait. In this case there is one function, default, which returns Self, which is a shorthand for the type implementing the trait, in this case StatusMessage.

When the contract executions it first loads the contract's state from storage. If no state exists it calls StatusMessage::default() to get the initial instance.

new

You might be familiar with constructors in other languages. Rust has no concept of a constructor, but it is common to have a function called new to create an instance of a type.

In this case, LookupMap::new(b"r") creates a new LookupMap. b"r" is byte representation of the string "r", which is used as a prefix before any keys. For example, eve.testnet --> reve.testnet. This creates a namespace for this data structure as long as this prefix is unique.