Wise Brothers, I seek you advice.

I am working on a Moose based class, that is to have a set of mutually exclusive boolean attributes. (Think radio buttons in a web form).

The attributes represent status, which can be 'success', 'error', 'pending' or undefined.

I have currently implemented this in Moose with one attribute that holds status, and a number of old style access methods to get and set the value:

package MyCompay::Result;
use Moose;

has '_status' => (
    is => 'rw',
    isa => 'Str',
);

sub success
{
    my($self, $arg) = @_;
    
    if( defined $arg )
    {
        $self->_status( (!!$arg) ? 'success' : undef ); 
    }
    
    return ( 'success' eq $self->_status() );
}

sub error
{
    my($self, $arg) = @_;
    
    if( defined $arg )
    {
        $self->_status( (!!$arg) ? 'error' : undef ); 
    }
    
    return ( 'error' eq $self->_status() );
}

sub pending
{
    my($self, $arg) = @_;
    
    if( defined $arg )
    {
        $self->_status( (!!$arg) ? 'pending' : undef ); 
    }
    
    return ( 'pending' eq $self->_status() );
}

1;

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The thing is, the code above is quite long and repetitive, which is just the sort of thing that Moose is designed to avoid. There is also nothing on the _status attribute to prevent something accessing it directly and setting it to an invalid value

Is there a more efficient way to achieve the same result? Can I declare virtual fields in Moose, and provide reader and writer methods, that just test or change the value of _status? Can I put guard on the _status field to enforce it's value so that it acts as an enum?

In reply to Moose: mutualy exclusive bolean attributes. by chrestomanci

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