Perl Cookbook

Generating Attribute Methods Using AUTOLOAD

Problem

Your object needs accessor methods to set or get its data fields, and you’re tired of writing them all out one at a time.

Solution

Carefully use Perl’s AUTOLOAD mechanism as a proxy method generator so you don’t have to create them all yourself each time you want to add a new data field.

Discussion

Perl’s AUTOLOAD mechanism intercepts all possible undefined method calls. So as not to permit arbitrary data names, we’ll store the list of permitted fields in a hash. The AUTOLOAD method will check to verify that the accessed field is in that hash.

package Person;
use strict;
use Carp;
use vars qw($AUTOLOAD %ok_field);

# Authorize four attribute fields
for my $attr ( qw(name age peers parent) ) { $ok_field{$attr}++; } 

sub AUTOLOAD {
    my $self = shift;
    my $attr = $AUTOLOAD;
    $attr =~ s/.*:://;
    return unless $attr =~ /[^A-Z]/;  # skip DESTROY and all-cap methods
    croak "invalid attribute method: ->$attr()" unless $ok_field{$attr};
    $self->{uc $attr} = shift if @_;
    return $self->{uc $attr};
}
sub new {
    my $proto  = shift;
    my $class  = ref($proto) || $proto;
    my $parent = ref($proto) && $proto;
    my $self = {};
    bless($self, $class);
    $self->parent($parent);
    return $self;
} 
1;

This class supports a constructor named new, and four attribute methods: name, age, peers, and parent. Use the module this way:

use Person; my ($dad, $kid); $dad = Person->new; $dad->name("Jason"); $dad->age(23); $kid = $dad->new; $kid->name("Rachel"); $kid->age(2); printf "Kid's ...