Moo, in theory your function should work. Is this the actual code you are using? Without seeing more code and the error message you are getting, I can but guess.

My main thought is that the

my $dbh = DBI->connect( " yada yada " ), { PrintError => 0},
      or die "cannot open db connection:  $DBI::errstr\n";
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is occuring in a different scope than the return call is. For example, if you are doing something like:

  eval {
      my $dbh = DBI->connect( " yada yada " ), { PrintError => 0},
      or die "cannot open db connection:  $DBI::errstr\n";
  }
  return $dbh;
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$dbh has gone out of scope before being returned and you will get undef on the other side.

Try using something like

sub db_connection {

    my ( $self ) = @_;
    my $dbh;
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Standard statements of making sure you are using -w and strict and a request to use the <code></code> tags.

mikfire