I have a perl class that expects an ID as an arg to it's new() method, does a database query with that ID, and offers a bunch of getX methods to get the various pieces of data from the database query. So for example, this works as expected: 
use DocumentInfo;
my $doc_info = DocumentInfo::new('919');
my $last_accessed = $doc_info->getLastAccessed();

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OK, great. but I don't want to make new DocumentInfo objects directly. I have a DocumentManager class that has a method getDocumentInfo, which passes its arguments to the new() method of DocumentInfo, and which I want to return a DocumentInfo object.. Here is that method in DocumentManager: 
use DocumentInfo;
...
sub getDocumentInfo {
  my $file_id = shift; # suspect problem here
  return DocumentInfo::new($file_id);
}

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and here's how I attempt to call it: 
use DocumentManager;
my $doc_mgr = DocumentManager::new();
my $doc_info = $doc_mgr->getDocumentInfo('919');

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It doesn't work because DocumentInfo does not get a scalar '919' as an arg to it's new() method - it gets a hash reference - $doc_id. Is this OO idiom impossible in Perl, or is there some syntax that will work?

In reply to object method that returns object by mutagen

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