Channel Entries API help

Hello everyone,

So I am writing a new module that will display a list of downloads to our user. Nothing crazy right? The list of files comes from a XML feed on another file server. Still not crazy? So I created a new channel to hold the downloads and used the channel entries API to add a entry for each download them after parsing the XML. Any need to get the electro shock treatment out? As the downloads are permissioned I wanted to create a new set of template tags to pull out all of the entries in the download channel and filter them according to a list of permissions already attached to the user and this is where I feel I am going mental.

There appears to be no get_entries method in the channel entries API. Just a something that will return all entries for a channel.

Am I missing something? and there is a nice, easy clean way to get a list of entries without messing about with the horror that is the exp.channel_data table. Should I be storing my data in a custom table?

thanks for any help Toby