Thanks a lot. I'm pretty sure that a factory method is what I need. I've never used them before, so I have some googling to do. Are there any especially good (or bad) docs? I am certainly confused (which is why I'm coming here for help) and the fog is starting to lift thanks to everyone's help.

My problem with Service::XML->new is that I really need to call it as Service::$var->new, as I don't know which service will be used until I get the data. I tried various forms of that and got various syntax errors. Obviously I will have to do lots of error checking in case a service is requested that has no subclass, but I'm trying to get the basics working first. Which I won't if I make trivial blunders like the character class Choroba pointed out.

Regards,

John Davies

Update: https://www.perl.com/pub/2003/08/15/design3.html/ looks helpful to me, although I think there are some more modern constructs I could use.

In reply to Re^2: Inheritance when subclass passed as a parameter by davies
in thread [Solved] Inheritance when subclass passed as a parameter by davies

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