DB_DataObject: complex join advice sought

Having great success with DB_DataObject. (Thanks Alan et al!) I'm wondering how best to do a join where various fields are used for select and deep child ones for sort critera, like this. SELECT * FROM tTrain tr, tSchedRun sr, tTime tm WHERE tr.date='2002-05-14' AND sr.id=tr.tSchedRun_id AND tm.id=sr.tTime_id ORDER BY tm.runTime; Even if one fully uses table linking, it seems like there has to be procedural code which also causes a lot of SQL transactions, instead of doing it all in just one DB query. 1. How to sort by "deep child" table columns? In the case above, I'm selecting by a parent table value and then sorting by a deep child value. The only way I can see to accomplish the sort is to load the deep child id's into an array, then sort by them, and then query the whole mess in that order again. 2. If you use the ::query method giving it something like the above, how do you indicate what sort of object is returned? I've tried replacing the "*" with something like join(",", array_keys($t->_get_table()) to try to stuff the results into my object of choice. No good. 3. If I have multiple nested levels of auto linked tables, is there a way to say to an object, "recursively getLinks on all your children?" Eg, must I while ($t->fetch()) { $t->getLinks(); $t->_fooField->getLinks(); $t->_fooField->_blahField->getLinks(); $t->_fooField->_blahField->_zorkField->getLinks(); .... } If so, that seems like a waste of transactions since that's one for the fetch and one more for each getLinks(). Maybe ::fetch or ::find could take a "recurse" arg? TIA and Regards, -- Mitchell Perilstein mitch at enetis dot net www.enetis.net/~mitch