I have an object called student which maps to a student table. There is also a courses table, and user_courses table to assign students to courses. This student object can have many course objects, and therefore, with my Students DataMapper it will retrieve student objects and any course objects for the courses that the student is enrolled in. This works fine for the cases where I need all of this information, but in the cases where I only need to display the student name and last name, the retrieval of course objects is unnecessary. My question is, how should I design my dataMappers to account for this? Should I have separate mappers for different levels of student objects, i.e. baseStudentObject with just the basic student info and then an extendedStudentObject which additionally includes the course objects? Or better to implement some sort of lazy loading solution? As always, all input is very much appreciated! Cheers.
