Autoload and Symbol Table

[Alejandro Calbazana]

Hello,

I have a question about Autoload and the Symbol Table. I would like
to create setters and getters for various object attributes using
Autoload in order to populate object's from data at runtime given a
mapping. The idea here is that I would create objects dynamically
based on a type and then be able to "set" the newly created object's
attributes knowing nothing more than what's in it's the symbol table.

My setters are named something like "set_xxx" where "xxx" is the
attribute I want to set. These live in Autoload and work as expected.

My problem is that when I dump the symbol table, none of the Autoload
methods appear until after the first invocation. I am wondering if
there is a way to get these loaded into the symbol table from my
constructor without calling each "set_xxx" explicitly.

Is there any way to do this?

Thanks,

Alejandro

 

[Ben Morrow]

I have a question about Autoload and the Symbol Table. I would like
to create setters and getters for various object attributes using
Autoload in order to populate object's from data at runtime given a
mapping. The idea here is that I would create objects dynamically
based on a type and then be able to "set" the newly created object's
attributes knowing nothing more than what's in it's the symbol table.

My setters are named something like "set_xxx" where "xxx" is the
attribute I want to set. These live in Autoload and work as expected.

My problem is that when I dump the symbol table, none of the Autoload
methods appear until after the first invocation. I am wondering if
there is a way to get these loaded into the symbol table from my
constructor without calling each "set_xxx" explicitly.

Is there any way to do this?

Yes there is, but it would almost certainly be better not to do it
this way. What I would do is have a method 'get_attributes' or some
such on each of these objects that returns a list of which attributes
are valid for that object: this is much safer than messing around with
the symbol table when you don't need to.

OTOH, if you *must* do this, the easiest way is

require subs;
import subs qw/set_one set_two/;

..

Ben