On 9/11/07, Tai Lee <real.hu...@mrmachine.net> wrote:

Yes, that method works, and that's the recommended way to go for now,
but as for what it's missing, it's a little more subtle. It's not
missing any functionality, that much is true. What it's missing is the
ability to quickly get from one model to another, and have
relationship fields easily accessible.

With a standard M2M field, you can just use film.actors.all() and
actor.films.all(), but with the method you identified, there's another
level between the two. This may not be too bad for you and me, but
it's murder on template designers who shouldn't need to know about
those types of things.

As for the relationship fields, they're on a separate object which
also makes it quite unintuitive to somebody who's not familiar with
the inner workings.

What I'm working on is a way to provide the functional benefits of M2M
with relationship data (like your example), with the human-natural API
provided by the standard M2M field.

I hope that helps explain it.

-Gul