Using DAO for reports or lists?

Question

Kind of a dumb question, but I'm trying to improve (read that start) the MVC isolation in a web application using JSP.
I have created DAO's for the common business objects, but when it comes to reporting, what's the best way to do this?
For example, a Contact will have a ContactDAO, and will represent a specific thing. But if I want a list of contacts added this month, what's the "best practice" way of getting those?
It seems horribly inefficient to return an array of Contacts.
We're hard-coding the query into the page - which I know is a bad idea. But it's fast.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Same query as will be executed by the DAO. Only
difference is that you're iterating through a
ResultSet instead of a List. What's so much better?Yes, we're returning a ResultSet which the calling page scrolls through. Just requires the programmer to close the connection when they're done. This works, and is fast, I just wasn't sure it was in line with "best practices".
If you're saying that it's inefficient to get one DAO
at a time instead of SELECTing them all at once, I
agree. It'd be better to provide an interface that
would bring all those Contacts back in one query.
(That's the object-relational impedence mismatch,
writ large.) Write a finder that can bring back one
or many Contacts, depending on the criteria. I'd
just overload the find() method.So that does actually fall in line with current thinking then? Good. I was going to reject returning a collection of Contacts.
Thanks for the response. And 4 and a half years! Wow. We really HAVE been busy.... (actually my last 3 years have been at a M$ shop - I'm slowly "converting" them to power, beauty and speed of J2EE).