Think about it the other way: if it worked the way you want, someone would soon complain that they overrode create and called find_or_create expecting it to call their overriden create, but it didn't.

If you create an infinite loop or somesuch thing by overriding create, you should reconsider your strategy. You can either override find_or_create as well, or hack your method to keep state so that it breaks out of the loop.

If you create an infinite loop or somesuch thing by overriding create, you should reconsider your strategy

I agree. So, who needs create. It's a silly name. The same could be said about new....so in the same type of situation, I can't override new in the subclass? That's wrong IMHO. There should never be a situation where I can't provide my own new(). And I don't really think and SUPER class methods calling new on itself or it's subclass is quite kosher either; but it happens.

There's nothing special about new() in Perl -- it's the same as any other method. You can override it, and you will have the same trials and tribulations with overriding it that you would have with any other inheritance scenario. It still sounds like you're complaining that you don't like OOP to me.

I never said "don't override it", I even proposed two ways you could do it! This is a general situation: if you want to override method A so that it calls method B, and you know that method B will call method A, you can fix the loop by overriding method B. For example,

    package MyApp::DBI;
    use base 'Class::DBI';
    __PACKAGE__->connection(...);
    1;

    package MyApp::Gallery;
    use base 'MyApp::DBI';
    __PACKAGE__->table('galleries');
    __PACKAGE__->columns(...);

    sub create {
        my ($self, $ops) = @_;

        my $dir = $ops->{'directory'};

        if (-e $dir) {
            die 'directory exists';
        else {
            mkdir $directory;
            $self->find_or_create($data);
        };
       return;
    };

    sub find_or_create {
        my $class    = shift;
        my $hash     = ref $_[0] eq "HASH" ? shift: {@_};
        my ($exists) = $class->search($hash);
        return defined($exists) ? $exists $class->SUPER::create($hash)
+;
    }

    1;
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