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

I'm failing badly at trying to store an array into the store of Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable::Module (storage should be provided by Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable::Store). It must be trivial for many of you to just look it up and guide me along but I tried looking into the examples, source and documentation and got nowhere so I'd be thankful for any help and pointers.

I tried in a module which gets loaded by a Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable object:

package Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable::Module::MyModuleName;
use warnings;
use strict;
use base qw(Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable::Module);

sub init {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->config(
        {
            fruit_order     => ["apple","lemon"],
            is_weekend      => 0
        }
    );
}

sub admin {
   my ($self, $msg) = @_;
   my $who = $msg->{who};
   my $body = $msg->{body}; 
   
   if ( $body =~ /^!setorder\s*$/ ) {
     my @order = ["orange","pea"];
     $self->set('fruit_order'=>\@order);
     return "order set";
   }

   if ( $body =~ /^!getorder\s*$/ ) {
     my @order = @{ $self->get('fruit_order') || [] };
     return @order;
   }
}
1;

[download]

...but this doesn't work. The !getorder command never shows any order from the storage - neither when called first (should be filled with "apple" and "lemon") nor when called after the !setorder command (should now be filled with "orange" and "pea").

Setting a scalar value (is_weekend) is straight from the documentation and should work, but how do I set() and get() an array in there? Thanks for your help!

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Re: How to store an array in the store of Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable::Module?
by jethro (Monsignor) on Jan 21, 2011 at 17:19 UTC

    One bug is in line 22. It should be

    my @order = ("orange","pea");

    [download]

    because '[]' creates a pointer to a constant array, not a constant array, the pointer gets generated in the next line

[reply]
[d/l]

      Thanks for your reply. I made that line up and you're right - it would lead to an array reference. Sadly though, this wasn't the problem. Both of the following snippets don't work, they both return 0:

      if ( $body =~ /^!seto\s*$/ ) {
        my @order = ("pea","plum","banana");
        $self->set("fruit_order"=>@order);
        my @o = @{ $self->get("fruit_order") || [] };
        return @o;
}
if ( $body =~ /^!seto\s*$/ ) {
        my @order = ("pea","plum","banana");
        $self->set("fruit_order"=>\@order);
        my @o = @{ $self->get("fruit_order") || [] };
        return @o;
}

      [download]

      As I digged a bit deeper into the according modules I couldn't find any example of an array being stored and retreived. Could it be possible that storing arrays is not supported by the module?

[reply]
[d/l]

        If at all, the second of your two snippets should work. And it should even work if storing arrays isn't possible because a reference behaves like a scalar in most situations. For example if you print it, it says "ARRAY(0x...)".

        I notice that you write in your first post "Setting a scalar value (is_weekend) is straight from the documentation and should work". You might test that first, even documentation can have bugs. This should help get some answers:

        # instead of my @o = @{ $self->get("fruit_order") || [] };
my $o= $self->get("fruit_order");
use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper($o),"\n";
print ref $o,"\n";
return @$o if (ref $o eq 'ARRAY');

        [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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