Package Info

perl-Class-Base


Useful Base Class for Deriving Other Modules


Development/Libraries/Perl

Please consider using Badger::Base instead which is the successor of this module.

This module implements a simple base class from which other modules can be derived, thereby inheriting a number of useful methods such as 'new()', 'init()', 'params()', 'clone()', 'error()' and 'debug()'.

For a number of years, I found myself re-writing this module for practically every Perl project of any significant size. Or rather, I would copy the module from the last project and perform a global search and replace to change the names. Each time it got a little more polished and eventually, I decided to Do The Right Thing and release it as a module in it's own right.

It doesn't pretend to be an all-encompassing solution for every kind of object creation problem you might encounter. In fact, it only supports blessed hash references that are created using the popular, but by no means universal convention of calling 'new()' with a list or reference to a hash array of named parameters. Constructor failure is indicated by returning undef and setting the '$ERROR' package variable in the module's class to contain a relevant message (which you can also fetch by calling 'error()' as a class method).

e.g.

my $object = My::Module->new(
file => 'myfile.html',
msg  => 'Hello World'
) || die $My::Module::ERROR;

or:

my $object = My::Module->new({
file => 'myfile.html',
msg  => 'Hello World',
}) || die My::Module->error();

The 'new()' method handles the conversion of a list of arguments into a hash array and calls the 'init()' method to perform any initialisation. In many cases, it is therefore sufficient to define a module like so:

package My::Module;
use Class::Base;
use base qw( Class::Base );

sub init {
my ($self, $config) = @_;

$self->params($config, qw( FOO BAR )) || return undef; return $self; }

1;

Then you can go right ahead and use it like this:

use My::Module;

my $object = My::Module->new( FOO => 'the foo value',
			  BAR => 'the bar value' )
    || die $My::Module::ERROR;

Despite its limitations, Class::Base can be a surprisingly useful module to have lying around for those times where you just want to create a regular object based on a blessed hash reference and don't want to worry too much about duplicating the same old code to bless a hash, define configuration values, provide an error reporting mechanism, and so on. Simply derive your module from 'Class::Base' and leave it to worry about most of the detail. And don't forget, you can always redefine your own 'new()', 'error()', or other method, if you don't like the way the Class::Base version works.


License: Artistic-1.0 or GPL-1.0+
URL: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Class-Base/

Categories

Releases

Package Version Update ID Released Package Hub Version Platforms Subpackages
0.09-bp155.2.8 info GA Release 2023-05-17 15 SP5
  • AArch64
  • ppc64le
  • s390x
  • x86-64
  • perl-Class-Base
0.09-bp154.1.13 info GA Release 2022-05-09 15 SP4
  • AArch64
  • ppc64le
  • s390x
  • x86-64
  • perl-Class-Base
0.09-bp153.1.12 info GA Release 2021-03-06 15 SP3
  • AArch64
  • ppc64le
  • s390x
  • x86-64
  • perl-Class-Base
0.09-bp152.3.13 info GA Release 2020-04-16 15 SP2
  • AArch64
  • ppc64le
  • s390x
  • x86-64
  • perl-Class-Base
0.09-bp151.3.1 info GA Release 2019-07-18 15 SP1
  • AArch64
  • ppc64le
  • s390x
  • x86-64
  • perl-Class-Base
0.09-bp151.2.10 info GA Release 2019-05-18 15 SP1
  • AArch64
  • ppc64le
  • s390x
  • x86-64
  • perl-Class-Base
0.09-bp150.2.4 info GA Release 2018-07-30 15
  • AArch64
  • ppc64le
  • s390x
  • x86-64
  • perl-Class-Base