Hello my fellow Monks,

Please forgive me for I believe I have sinned. I believe I have broken the rule of "is-a" in order to serve my own selfish purposes. I use the CGI::Application framework for a lot of projects and one of the things I like to do is for each different section of the application I make a separate package as a separate file to keep things organized. For those who know how CGI::App is built and used there are plugin modules that take advantage of the Class (such as CGI::Application::Plugins::DBH.) When initialized it requires that you use $self as in my $dbh = $self->dbh();. So in order to use $self conveniently I abuse inheritance. For example: 
package My::App;

use strict;
use warnings;
use base qw(CGI::Application BLL::OtherPackage);

sub setup {
    my $self = shift;

    $self->mode_param('section');
    $self->start_mode('home');
    $self->run_modes(
        'here_sub'   =>    'here_sub',
        'test_rm'    =>    'sub_in_other_file',
    );
}

sub here_sub {
    my $self = shift;
    # no problems using self here
}

1;

### Separate file
package BLL::OtherPackage;

use strict;
use warnings;

sub sub_in_other_file {
   my $self = shift;
   # $self would be what I expected if I didn't put this in 
   # the 'use base' or @ISA for that matter. What an abuse.
}
1;

[download]
As a long time programer of Perl I feel that this is something that I shouldn't be doing and that there is a correct (and better) way of getting a subroutine's $self to behave as if it were a method of a class even though it's in a separate file. I feel like I am doing something completely wrong. What is the best way to fix this and have methods to a class organised and separated in to separate files? I have Damian Conway's Object oriented Perl but it really hasn't given me any ideas as to how to deal with this.

My thanks for your help,
BMaximus

In reply to Class Inheritance Abuse. Best way to fix it? by BMaximus

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