To add a record, send the addRecord() message to an active store object. The format of the record is defined at customization time and is implementation-dependent. The formatting facilities of the toolkit can be used, so the record can be built from different data fields located in different levels of the operation context. Each concrete store implementation provides an external HashtableFormat definition, which describes the data fields to be stored and how they must be formatted so that the store record will be constructed. A record is obtained by sending the format(Context aContext) message to the specific HashtableFormat object.
The arguments of the addRecord() method provide the Store service with the data already formatted, a context and a format name, or a context and a format. In the cases where the third argument is either a format or a format name, the service itself will call the format() method of the format object to build the store record.