Ok, great stuff, now we're getting somewhere. So, the model = the nouns. Good. That helps. Now, how do you represent in the model a complex query that joins across 5 of the nouns? For example, our app is a network monitoring and display tool. It receives status messages from sites nationwide, and makes a web interface. (It does other things but this will do for now). One of the reports we run is called "stale watches", which basically means "we expected to receive a message from site Foo reporting on the status of Bar (say, CPU Load), and we didn't hear from them." We call this a stale watch. We have a report that shows all of the currently stale watches across our network. The query is a join of around 4 tables (or nouns) - Site, Watch, Watch Config, Message - something along those lines.
Does one create a model object called StaleWatchReport? That seems to me to be suspiciously like an action by another name. But that's the only way I can see this thing working, because otherwise, the Controller is going to get in the business of defining what a StaleWatchReport means and start having to deal with DBI record sets. I can't quite imagine what this StaleWatchReport would look like. In your concert example, if I wanted to define a report that showed me all of the seats that were purchased by people from New Jersey with a Mastercard in the last week, how would I represent that? I guess what I am getting at is that I see how if I wanted to present someone with the list of Sites, or even the list of Sites that met some criteria (newer than one month old, or whatever), I could have a Site object in the model that had a getSiteList() method that took an optional date range or whatever. But I get lost when trying to figure out how result sets that are the result of a join or relationship between "noun"s would be represented. I hope that makes sense. =) -Fran
