Can I use decorators to manipulate return type or create methods?

[WakeBdr]

I'm writing a class that will query a database for some data and return
the result to the caller.  I need to be able to return the result of
the query in several different ways: list, xml, dictionary, etc.  I was
wondering if I can use decorators to accomplish this.

For instance, I have the following method

def getUsers(self, params):
    return users.query(dbc)

To get the appropriate return types, I also have these methods.  I have
these convenience methods for every query method in my class.

def getUsersAsXML(self, params):
    return self._toXML(self.getUsers(params))
def getUsersAsDict(self, params):
    return self._toDict(self.getUsers(params))
def getUsersAsList(self, params):
    return self._toList(self.getUsers(params))

Instead of creating these three methods for every query method, is
there a way to use decorators to manipulate the return type.  I'd still
like to have the caller use getUsersAsXML, I just don't want to write
the AsXML methods for every query method.  So the decorator would
essentially create the convenience methods instead of me coding them.

One solution that I don't want to use is passing a variable into the
query method that determines the return type.  This is what I don't
want to do.
def getUsers(self, params, returnType):

Any ideas on how I can accomplish this?

thanks