This is unrelated to your actual question / problem.

But this reply bears upon the question of organization or factoring of code, which is closely related to the OPed question. ++ from me.

My personal opinion - feel free to ignore it.

The section advising use of a list getter for member data so that normal list processing functions can be used on the data makes me wish I could ++ again. Ignore this advice if you will, but you do so at your own peril!