[Catalyst] Where is the DAO equivalent?

[Jarom Smith]

Hello Catalysters:

First of all, a thousand apologies if this is a FAQ (and if it is, 
please point me in the right direction).  I have been programming in 
Perl for a while but I freely admit there's a lot I don't know, which is 
why I am here.  I have completed the Catalyst tutorial, purchased the 
book (which I am in the process of reading/completing) and I have 
scrutinized all sorts of web pages trying to figure this out, but have 
so far been unsuccessful.

Here's the problem I'm trying to solve: I have a partially-written web 
application which I am trying to port to Catalyst.  My app has DBI 
methods to access the DB and return results -- things like 
get_vendor_by_name() or get_option_list().  In Java, which is the 
language I use most often these days, I would think of them as DAO 
methods.  Some of these methods are fairly trivial to replace in 
Catalyst; for example, get_vendor_by_name now becomes 
$c->resultset('Vendor')->search({name => $vendor_name})->all;  However, 
some of these methods are more complicated/complex and the proper DBIC 
invocation to produce an equivalent result to my DBI method is more than 
I would want to try to remember or replace each time I need to perform 
that query.  I don't mind re-writing the methods to use DBIC instead of 
DBI (in fact, I kind of look forward to it), but I would like to 
continue to have complex or semi-complex queries abstracted into their 
own methods which I can re-use easily.  The problem is that I don't know 
where to put them or how to access them.

So, my question is: In a Catalyst context, where do I put these kinds of 
"helper" DB methods and how do I access them? (both from within a 
Catalyst app, as well as from the command-line like in a Cron job or 
whatever...)  Some actual specific examples would be great.  I'm sure 
there is a way, and I'm guessing it involves the model somehow (possibly 
by creating a new model class?) but I haven't been able to figure it out 
yet.  I tried adding methods to the classes created by Catalyst/DBIC in 
the Schema/Result directory, but gradually it dawned on me that methods 
placed here are only dealing with a single entity of that type.  To go 
back to Java-speak, it seems like the stuff in Schema/Result are DTO 
methods; what I'm trying to figure out is how/where to put the DAO methods.

Help!  :-)  Thanks.

jarom smith
tech go-to guy