Much as I thought my understanding of references was going well, again misunderstanding strikes and I seek your wisdom.

The following code is a bare-bones test and demonstration of the issue I am having. In the module's new method I read an array from a database which is simulated here by @columns.

package crmtest;

use strict;
use warnings;

sub new {
    my ($class, $env) = @_;
    my @columns = ('one', 'two', 'three', 'four');
    my $self = bless {
        'env'        => $env,
        'column'    => \@columns,                    # <-- Reference t
+o an array given here
    }, $class;
    return $self;
}

sub add {
    my ($self, $fields) = @_;
    foreach my $field(@$self->{'column'}) {            # <-- Not an AR
+RAY reference here
        print $field . " -- " . $self->{'column'} . "\n";
        # do stuff...
    }
}

1;
[download]

Here is what I think is happening...
I put a reference to the @columns array into the blessed anonymous hash to which $self holds the reference. The constructor returns the reference to the anonymous hash.
Later on, in the add method I want to iterate over the array so I dereference the key in the anonymous hash using @$self->{'column'}

Except I get the error - Not an ARRAY reference at crmtest.pm line 18
So I added the print line and removed the dereferencing so I tried iterating over $self->{'column'} without the '@'. This tells me that both $field and $self->{'column'} are the same as I would expect and that they are both ARRAY(0xe3c1f0)

This is the code I am using to test the bare-bones of the module:

use strict;
use warnings;

use lib('.');

use crmtest;

my $crm = crmtest->new('someenv');

my $cols = {
    'col1'    => 'something',
    'col2'    => 'anotherthing',
    'four'    => 'moretest',
};

$crm->add($cols);
[download]

Am I not creating the reference to @columns properly or am I trying to dereference wrongly or I am completely missing how references work?

EDIT:
To test what I am doing I have tried an even simpler version:

my @columns = ('one', 'two', 'three', 'four');
my $ref = \@columns;
print @$ref;
[download]

And that does exactly what I expected - prints out the array. So it seems I am not totally on the wrong track!

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