So a situation I run into reasonably often is one where my models start to either:

• Grow into monsters with tons and tons of methods

OR

• Allow you to pass pieces of SQL to them, so that they are flexible enough to not require a million different methods

For example, say we have a "widget" model. We start with some basic methods:

• get($id)
• insert($record)
• update($id, $record)
• delete($id)
• getList() // get a list of Widgets

That's all fine and dandy, but then we need some reporting:

• listCreatedBetween($start_date, $end_date)
• listPurchasedBetween($start_date, $end_date)
• listOfPending()

And then the reporting starts to get complex:

• listPendingCreatedBetween($start_date, $end_date)
• listForCustomer($customer_id)
• listPendingCreatedBetweenForCustomer($customer_id, $start_date, $end_date)

You can see where this is growing... eventually we have so many specific query requirements that I either need to implement tons and tons of methods, or some sort of "query" object that I can pass to a single ->query(query $query) method...

... or just bite the bullet, and start doing something like this:

• list = MyModel->query(" start_date > X AND end_date < Y AND pending = 1 AND customer_id = Z ")

There's a certain appeal to just having one method like that instead of 50 million other more specific methods... but it feels "wrong" sometimes to stuff a pile of what's basically SQL into the controller.

Is there a "right" way to handle situations like this? Does it seem acceptable to be stuffing queries like that into a generic ->query() method?

Are there better strategies?