Please provide a minimal demonstration of the problem. At the very least, tell us how it's failing.

• Did you specify coerce=>1 on the attribute?

• Is your coercion routine getting called?

• Is your coercion routine return a reference to a hash as it should (as opposed to a list of key-values)?

• What is your coercion routine returning, exactly? Change

  return ...;
  [download]

  to

  my @x = ...;
  use Data::Dumper;
  warn(Dumper(\@x));
  return $x[0];
  [download]

Thanks for your reply - I've posted the code above..

I've tried coerce on a subtype with via => performing the 2 splits required.. I'm missing something.. I can't get this to work no matter what I try.

Could you post the code you tried?

Here's the code I'm working with (comments inline):

package test;

use Moose;
use Moose::Util::TypeConstraints;

subtype 'mytype'
    => as 'HashRef[Str]'
;

coerce 'mytype'
    => from 'Str'
    => via {
        my %h = map { split('=', $_) } split(',', $_);
        return \%h;
    }
;

has 'mytype' => (
    traits => ['Hash'],
    is => 'rw',
    isa => 'mytype',
    coerce => 1,
    # presumably I need an explicit accessor
    # to prevent coercion when I pass
    # a key in to access the value?
    handles   => {
        get_option     => 'get',
    },
);

package main;
use Data::Dumper;

my $t = test->new;

# coerce into a hash
$t->mytype('foo=bar,foo2=bar2');

warn Dumper $t->mytype;

# how do i now access the hash by key?
# this tries to coerce all over again!
warn $t->mytype('foo');

# and this doesn't work at all
warn $t->mytype_get('foo');
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Your module works fine:

# ... all same above ...
package main;
use Data::Dumper;

my $t = test->new;

$t->mytype('foo=bar,foo2=bar2');

warn Dumper $t->mytype;

# Don't call $t->mtype('foo')

# Use correct method name!!
warn $t->get_option('foo');
[download]

Good Day,
    Dean