Have you paid attention to this part of the manual page: 
BUGS
       1.  Adding or altering substructures to a hash value is
           not entirely transparent in current perl.  If you want
           to store a reference or modify an existing reference
           value in the DBM, it must first be retrieved and
           stored in a temporary variable for further modifica­
           tions.  In particular, something like this will NOT
           work properly:

                   $mldb{key}{subkey}[3] = 'stuff';        # won't wor
+k

           Instead, that must be written as:

                   $tmp = $mldb{key};                      # retrieve 
+value
                   $tmp->{subkey}[3] = 'stuff';
                   $mldb{key} = $tmp;                      # store val
+ue

           This limitation exists because the perl TIEHASH inter­
           face currently has no support for multidimensional
           ties.

[download]

Abigail

In reply to Re: Need help with complex tied data structure by Abigail-II
in thread Need help with complex tied data structure by genecutl

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.