When the application initializes, Ember Data creates store, a local store object. this.store is the object that will create, retrieve, update, and delete all of the Tracker app’s model records. Ember injects the store object in all Routes, Controllers, and Components. In the scope of route methods, you have access to the store from this.

To create a record, you will call this.store.createRecord. This method expects two arguments: a model name, as a string, and record data, as an object.

Open app/routes/sightings.js. Delete your dummy sightings and create three new sighting records, each with a location value as a string and a sightedAt value as a new Date:

import Ember from 'ember';

export default Ember.Route.extend({
  model() {
    return [
      {
        id: 1,
        location: 'Asilomar',
        sighted_at: new Date('2016-03-07')
      },
      ...
      {
        id: 6,
        location: 'Asilomar',
        sightedAt: new Date('2016-03-07')
      }
    ];
    let record1 = this.store.createRecord('sighting', {
      location: 'Atlanta',
      sightedAt: new Date('2016-02-09')
    });

    let record2 = this.store.createRecord('sighting', {
      location: 'Calloway',
      sightedAt: new Date('2016-03-14')
    });

    let record3 = this.store.createRecord('sighting', {
      location: 'Asilomar',
      sightedAt: new Date('2016-03-21')
    });

    return [record1, record2, record3];
  }
});

In Chapter 20, the sightings route model returned an array. Instead of returning JavaScript objects, you have created three sighting records and returned these records in an array. Run ember server, if it is not running already, to see your new records on the sightings route, http://​localhost:4200/​sightings (Figure 21.1).

Figure 21.1  create sightings

This example shows that creating Ember Data models is very similar to creating JavaScript objects. The advantage to having Ember Data model objects is all the methods these objects give you. Let’s start with get and set.