buz260 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

First of all, I'm not sure what Perl's equivalent of Java's bean properties are called (any ideas?). I am using methods of a certain class to store data - eg 
sub entity2 { $_[0]->{entity2}=$_[1] if defined $_[1]; $_[0]->{entity2
+} }
sub IxnCount { $_[0]->{IxnCount}=$_[1] if defined $_[1]; $_[0]->{IxnCo
+unt} }

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However the above can only get / set / store scalars. To have object properties which can store arrays, I have been doing the following: 
sub synsatMaxScore1 {    
    my ($self, @pmIDs) = @_; 
    if (@pmIDs) {
        my $ref = \@pmIDs;
        $self->{synsatMaxScore1} = $ref;
    }    
    return $self->{synsatMaxScore1};
}

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To set the property, it's  $object->synsatMaxScore1(@array). However it seems that the data can ultimately only be stored as a reference to an array, and also when getting the property, at the moment you then have to derefererence the array: 
my $arrayref = $object->synsatMaxScore1;
my @array = @$arrayref;

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Is there any way of changing the method so that it can return arrays too? I guess this is something to do with the way Perl internally handles Object Oriented modules... Thanks in advance.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Bean properties...
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 28, 2009 at 10:00 UTC 
    #!/usr/bin/perl --

use strict;
use warnings;

beans();
warn $_ for beans(); # 7
warn scalar beans();

sub beans {
    return unless defined wantarray;
    warn 'beans';
    my @beans = 1 .. 3;
    return wantarray ? @beans : \@beans;
}
__END__
beans at - line 12.
1 at - line 7.
2 at - line 7.
3 at - line 7.
beans at - line 12.
ARRAY(0x183aaa0) at - line 8.

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[d/l]
      Sorry, can you explain that please?
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