Basic Accessor Methods using Class::Multimethods

ignatz has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

My most gracious fellow Monks,

I'm trying to get a handle on Class::Multimethods but I can't seem to get it to do basic class accessor methods when if nothing is passed to the method it just returns the class field for the method, otherwise if a string is passed, it assigned that string to the field. For instance:

my $f = Flub->new("Cheese is Good.");
print $f->flubble() . "\n";
$f->flubble("Cheese is Bad");
print $f->flubble() . "\n";
[download]

I know that this is easily possible doing basic Perl, but I'm hoping to get into fancier things after I figure out how this works.

My full code is below.

Thanks!

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

package Flub;
use strict;
use Class::Multimethods;

sub new
{
    my ($class) = @_;
    bless {
        _flub    => $_[1] || "",
    }, $class;

} # new

multimethod flubble => ('*') => sub { 
    my ($self) = shift;
    return $self->{_flub};
};

multimethod flubble => ('$') => sub { 
    my ($self) = shift;
    $self->{_flub} = shift;
    return $self->{_flub};
};

package main;

use strict;

my $f = Flub->new("Cheese is Good.");
print "Trying to display \$f->{_flub}: " . 
    $f->flubble() . "\n";
print "Trying to assign Cheese is Bad to \$f->{_flub}: " . 
    $f->flubble("Cheese is Bad ") . "\n";
[download]

Comment on Basic Accessor Methods using Class::Multimethods Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Basic Accessor Methods using Class::Multimethods by lachoy (Parson) on Feb 27, 2002 at 21:33 UTC
I think if you just want accessor/mutator methods, you might be better off with a more focused module: Class::Accessor. It's extremely simple: `package My::Class; use strict; use base qw( Class::Accessor ); My::Class->mk_accessors( qw( field1 field2 field3 ) );` [download] That's it! This creates the methods 'field1', 'field2', and 'field3' which act as accessors/mutators. You can also inherit a simple `new()` method and a number of other actions. IMO, the docs are well-written and easy to follow, and while there are a few dependencies the CPAN shell should TCB for you... Chris M-x auto-bs-mode	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Basic Accessor Methods using Class::Multimethods by ignatz (Vicar) on Feb 27, 2002 at 21:49 UTC
Thanks for the replay. The problem is that I am trying to get Multimethods to do more complex stuff and I stumble over this simple problem.	[reply]