I'm using the new Router without ember-data so I have to implement my own serialize/deserialize for dynamic url segments.

I have an ArrayController which is populated with data within Application#ready.

For simplicities sake, lets say I have 2 routes: item > '/item/:item_id' & items > '/items'.

The deserialize method in the item route looks something along the lines of this

 deserialze: function(router, params){ 
     return router.get('myController')
                  .findProperty('id', params['item_id']);
 }

If I initialize my app on the items route and navigate to the item route for a specific item via an {{action}} everything works fine. Also, after this point I can manually change the url to specific id's without a problem.

However, if I try to start my app in the item route (ie /item/2), deserialize returns undefined. I'm assuming this is because Application#ready hasn't finished populating the controller.

How do I get around this?

Edit: I think this answers my question. Use ember-data.

ASYNCHRONY

One final point: you might be asking yourself how this system can work if the app has not yet loaded Post 1 > by the time App.Post.find(1) is called.

The reason this works is that ember-data always returns an object immediately, even if it needs to kick off a query. That object starts off with an empty data hash. When the server returns the data, ember-data updates the object's data, which also triggers bindings on all defined attributes (properties defined using DS.attr).

I don't know how to correct your initialization problem, but you definitely don't have to use ember-data if you don't want to.

Personnaly, I have :

• overridden the deserialize method for all Ember.Route,
• defined an App.ModelFetcher class that has class methods :
• find(id, doneRequestCallback, failRequestCallback)
• all(doneRequestCallback, failRequestCallback)
• call App.ModelFetcher.find(id, function() {}, function() {}) directly in the deserialize

These two methods, as ember-data does, returns respectively an empty App.Model object, and an empty array. When the request is done, these objects are inflated with request values.

There could be better solution, but it works fine for me, and does not look so bad.

You could also, instead of overriding the deserialize method, just define the classic App.Model.find(id) function (which returns an empty App.Model instance), and then set a state to your object, like ember-data does (see https://github.com/emberjs/data/blob/master/packages/ember-data/lib/system/model/states.js).

The method will automatically be called by ember if the dynamic segment has the format model_id (see https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/blob/master/packages/ember-routing/lib/routable.js#L251).

Anyway, I could be wrong, but I don't like the fact you're trying to get the object in your controller, but I have no other solution than those describe above.