Generics List or Custom List

I’ve been thinking about whether the DBObject should use generics for returning lists or use a custom list object. I think from a coding perspective generics would seem like the easier choice. The DBObject user could just return List and presto you have a list of users! The down side is that you can’t add custom functions to the List object. Using the custom list we can create UserList: CollectionBase This would give us a list of user objects that we can add our own methods to.

Why do I think custom methods on the list are important? To prevent unnecessary calls to the Database. With UserList I could get all the users in a project, and then filter out just what I need for each control. Example:

UserList users = users.ByProject(5);DropDownList active.DataSource = users.Active();Repeater r_Newest = users.Newest(10);

So instead of making two Database calls for Active users and Newest users, I made one database call and just filtered the data I was looking for. I think this is very important to have as the applications scales.
On the other hand I could do something like make the DBObject keep a cache of it’s own data. That just feels like a problem waiting to happen. The only way I can conceive of that is to have an Object Factory

For now I’m just going to stick with the custom lists