Accessing a class that is related to two other classes

Question

Given the following tables: User, Trial, UserTrial. Where A user has multiple trials, a Trial does not internally map to any Users and contains details about the trial (name, description, settings), and a UserTrial contains information specific to an instance of a User's trial (expiration date, for example). What would be the proper way for the controller of an MVC application to access data about a UserTrial?

Additional Details

• There is no ORM
• Each class is dual-purposed to be useable to create new, or load existing Users, Trials, or UserTrials. The constructor loads data when passed an ID and persists it with the method ->save()

It would seem that there are 2 options:

1

User.SetTrial() User.GetUserTrial()

2

UserTrial.SetUser() UserTrial.SetTrial() UserTrial.GetSomeData()

Which is the most appropriate usage?

Answer 1

I don't think your option 1 will work because if each User can have multiple Trials, then you'd need something like User.AddTrial(Trial), User.RemoveTrial(Trial), User.getUserTrails().

Which design option you choose depends on whether you want to make UserTrial objects "first class" or not. Do you want to consider Users and Trials to be the primary objects with UserTrial objects just glue to hold the relations, or do you want UserTrial objects to be primary as well? If the former, you'll want something like your option 1; if the latter, you'll want something like your option 2.