Thanks for everyone who chipped in a couple of days ago with ideas on this.

I've been having a play, and I've found something that appears to work and because I'm still not 100% on my OO stuff, I was hoping y'all could look at my solution and let me know if I've missed anything glaringly obvious, or really gone about this the wrong way.

I created a 'Common' module (for now it just contains the cgi function):

package JPI::Common;
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI;
{
  my $q;

  sub new_cgi {
    $q = CGI->new() unless defined $q;
    return $q;
  }
}
1;
[download]

To test this, I created a test module to change a param value:

package JPI::Test;
use strict;
use warnings;
use JPI::Common;

my $q = JPI::Common->new_cgi();

sub change_value {
  $q->param('test','value changed');
}
1;
[download]

Then I created the test script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use JPI::Common;
use JPI::Test;

my $q = JPI::Common->new_cgi();
$q->param('test','initial value');

print $q->header(),
      'Before: ',
      $q->param('test'),
      "\n";

JPI::Test->change_value();
print 'After: ',
      $q->param('test'),
      "\n";
[download]

And this does what I was looking for, ie, outputs:

Before: initial value
After: value changed
[download]

So, have I managed to solve the problem, or did I just get lucky? Am I doing this the most efficient way, or should I be returning a reference to the CGI object?!? Arghhh - another all-nighter takes its toll...

thoughts welcomed :)

cLive ;-)

--
seek(JOB,$$LA,0);