I have a dilemma. I've used DI (read: factory) to provide core components for a homebrew ORM. The container provides database connections, DAO's,Mappers and their resultant Domain Objects on request.

Here's a basic outline of the Mappers and Domain Object classes

class Mapper{
    public function __constructor($DAO){
        $this->DAO = $DAO;
        }

    public function load($id){
        if(isset(Monitor::members[$id]){
        return Monitor::members[$id];

        $values = $this->DAO->selectStmt($id);
        //field mapping process omitted for brevity
        $Object = new Object($values);
        return $Object;
        }
    }

 class User(){
     public function setName($string){
        $this->name = $string;
        //mark modified by means fair or foul
     }
 }

The ORM also contains a class (Monitor) based on the Unit of Work pattern i.e.

class Monitor(){
    private static array modified;
    private static array dirty;
    public function markClean($class);
    public function markModified($class);
}

The ORM class itself simply co-ordinates resources extracted from the DI container. So, to instantiate a new User object:

$Container = new DI_Container;
$ORM = new ORM($Container);
$User = $ORM->load('user',1);
//at this point the container instantiates a mapper class
//and passes a database connection to it via the constructor
//the mapper then takes the second argument and loads the user with that id
$User->setName('Rumpelstiltskin');//at this point, User must mark itself as "modified"

My question is this. At the point when a user sets values on a Domain Object class, I need to mark the class as "dirty" in the Monitor class. I have one of three options as I can see it

1: Pass an instance of the Monitor class to the Domain Object. I noticed this gets marked as recursive in FirePHP - i.e. $this->Monitor->markModified($this)

2: Instantiate the Monitor directly in the Domain Object - does this break DI? 3: Make the Monitor methods static, and call them from inside the Domain Object - this breaks DI too doesn't it?

What would be your recommended course of action (other than use an existing ORM, I'm doing this for fun...)