In the 'longer' (2.0) run, absolutely. I would love to extract the id handling into somewhere. The model instance method might not be the best place though because we have to deal with the ids without instances in some cases. Maybe a combination of static and instance methods on the model class will do. I also want to unify the composite id logic there too so that id value can be either a primitive or an object with properties for each of the fields for the composite id.