[Dbix-class] Resultset relation accessors

[David Ihnen]

Sometimes I think i'm missing something obvious.

In my application, for instance, a holiday can be assigned to a group.

A group has many donors
A donor might have many scheduled days
A scheduled day is associated with a particular schedule

In this spot in my application, the operation is "update group schedule" .

I need to say "refresh all of the randomized scheduling for all of the 
schedules related to all of the donors in the group this schedule is 
on."  To do that I need a list of those schedules.

I first wrote that, for an update overload in my holiday class, like 
this.  ($old is a hash ref to a copy of the get_columns from before the 
update took place)

 $self->groups->donors->schedule->ivr_schedule->search(
            { 'date_start' => { '<=' => $old->{holiday} }
            , -or =>
              [ 'date_end' => { '>=' => $old->{holiday} }
              , 'date_end' => undef
              ]
            } );

But I got an error, something like "No such method 'donors' on class 
DBIx::Class::ResultSet"

So I rewrote it...

 $self->groups->search_related('donors')->search_related('schedule')->search_related('ivr_schedule'
       , ...yaddayadda...

and that worked.

So it leaves me wondering if I missed something fundamental here.  I 
have an object which is a result set of a particular record type.  If I 
want the records that are related to that result set - why would I have 
to call 'related_resultset' - isn't "give me the related resulset" the 
only thing I could mean when I call ->relationship on a result set?  If 
that is so, why aren't there accessors created on the resultset for the 
valid relations, to cut down on excessive verbosity that doesn't clarify?

Curious,

David