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Moose-2.0301-TRIAL
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/ Moose::Cookbook::Extending::Recipe3

NAME

Moose::Cookbook::Extending::Recipe3 - Providing an alternate base object class

VERSION

version 2.0301

SYNOPSIS

package MyApp::Base;
use Moose;

extends 'Moose::Object';

before 'new' => sub { warn "Making a new " . $_[0] };

no Moose;

package MyApp::UseMyBase;
use Moose ();
use Moose::Exporter;

Moose::Exporter->setup_import_methods( also => 'Moose' );

sub init_meta {
    shift;
    return Moose->init_meta( @_, base_class => 'MyApp::Base' );
}

DESCRIPTION

A common extension is to provide an alternate base class. One way to do that is to make a MyApp::Base and add extends 'MyApp::Base' to every class in your application. That's pretty tedious. Instead, you can create a Moose-alike module that sets the base object class to MyApp::Base for you.

Then, instead of writing use Moose you can write use MyApp::UseMyBase.

In this particular example, our base class issues some debugging output every time a new object is created, but you can think of some more interesting things to do with your own base class.

This uses the magic of Moose::Exporter. When we call Moose::Exporter->setup_import_methods( also => 'Moose' ) it builds import and unimport methods for you. The also => 'Moose' bit says that we want to export everything that Moose does.

The import method that gets created will call our init_meta method, passing it for_caller => $caller as its arguments. The $caller is set to the class that actually imported us in the first place.

See the Moose::Exporter docs for more details on its API.

USING MyApp::UseMyBase

To actually use our new base class, we simply use MyApp::UseMyBase instead of Moose. We get all the Moose sugar plus our new base class.

package Foo;

use MyApp::UseMyBase;

has 'size' => ( is => 'rw' );

no MyApp::UseMyBase;

CONCLUSION

This is an awful lot of magic for a simple base class. You will often want to combine a metaclass trait with a base class extension, and that's when this technique is useful.

AUTHOR

Moose is maintained by the Moose Cabal, along with the help of many contributors. See "CABAL" in Moose and "CONTRIBUTORS" in Moose for details.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2011 by Infinity Interactive, Inc..

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.