AirDB Join Table Attributes

In some cases, it becomes necessary to have additional attributes associated with a many-many relationship. This is typically true of "has_and_belongs_to_many" associations which end up mirroring some kind of "membership" between the joined models. For example, a library system might track borrowing of books by patrons, with extra attributes for return dates and accrued fines. The Django guys have a handy example about musicians and bands with extra attributes such as the membership role and date of joining. In my case, I needed to track sharing status of Photos across Photosets. AirDB now has support for such join table attributes. Its a bit of a hack, in the interests of time, code size and abstraction concessions. The new things, which make it all possible include:
  1. An optional argument to Migrator.joinTable()
  2. DB.execute(sql) to allow tweaking an existing join table.
  3. Associator methods: setAttr, findAllByAttr, countByAttr, getAttrVal.
Here are some actual code excerpts (in the Photoset model) 
// The new migration directive
   function(my:Migrator):void {
      var statusCol:Array = ['status', DB.Field.VarChar, {
         limit: 4, 'default': Photo.ShareStatus.None}
      ];
      DB.execute(
         "ALTER TABLE photos_photosets ADD COLUMN " +
         DB.fieldMap(statusCol)
      )
   }
Setting the sharing status for a particular photo in this photoset 
public function photoSent(photo:Photo):void {
      this.photos.setAttr({status: Photo.ShareStatus.Sent}, photo);
   }
If no target is specified, the specified attributes are set for all associated photos in this photoset. 
this.photos.setAttr({status: Photo.ShareStatus.Sent});
Count the number of photos based on some attribute. 
var xfrCond:String = "status = '" + Photo.ShareStatus.Sent;
   this.photos.countByAttr(xfrCond);
Ideally, and with some coding leisure, this would be best done as a new has_many_through association. If you know of ActionScript language mechanisms to ease the implementation, I would be interested in hearing about them. Meanwhile, we have functional join tables attributes.