Doing a HAS-A probably would be better, or...

I could provide two constructors in the base class, 1) that would return a blessed scalar (the apache session ID), and another for local use, determined by caller(), that returns a blessed hash... that sounds like fun!

sub joe_method {
    my $self = ref ($_[0] eq 'SCALAR') ? getSessionHashRef(shift) : sh
+ift;

    # getSessionHashRef exists in base class, or...
    # MyApacheSessionHelper->getSessionHashRef (shift)
    ...
}
[download]

Actually, calling by RPC, the 1st arg would be (for me) SOAP::Lite. So the above should be:

sub joe_method {
    my $self = ref (shift eq 'SOAP::Lite') ? getSessionHashRef(shift) 
+: $_;
...
}
[download]

The blessed scaler (the sessionID) would be usefull for a proxy class -- wrapper for the RPC call -- client-side.