>I'm a big fan of the "One True Way" principle, so that rubs me the >wrong way. Why not simply have order_by/distinct/etc. be kwargs to >the manager functions? If there's a good reason to do the "chained >methods" that's fine, but let's not be too clever for our own sakes, eh?
One nice thing about chained methods is, you can pass around the query object and modify it after the fact. Think "curried queries" - you build a partial query and pass it to a function, which itself can add more query specifications or ordering or stuff like that, without needing to know about what the actual query is. This opens up a really nice way to build generic code: you only need to put those query specifications into your code that _your_ code needs, any filtering for example can be done outside. And I think all/filter is quite nice, too - that way you can see directly whether a query starts with the full set or wether you work on a subset. Sure, this can be done with one single method with parameters, but I rather like the distinguished method names - it's more readable to me. bye, Georg
