[xwiki-users] data model and velocity

I have a data model that follow this page structure: Detectors -> Detector1 -> Detector1History1 -> Detector1History2 -> Detector2 (Implemented with my DetectorClass and DetectorHistoryClass) The Detectors is like a dashboard for Detectors and their history. It's mostly working. My issue is that my Velocity code on that top dashboard page is looking pretty ugly. It has nested loops and I don't know how to do any encapsulation. If I could do things like detector1.getNewestHistory() that would be very helpful. But my Detector Object Class is limited to what I can define in XWiki. To my knowledge, XWiki's "user defined" classes aren't able to encapsulate code. Am I wrong? It seems like defining my Velocity macros would help, but my understanding is a macro can't return anything, just evaluates to output. If I'm wrong-headed, please correct me. Thanks, Scott