NAME

Class::PublicPrivate - Class with public keys with any name and a separate set of private keys

SYNOPSIS

PublicPrivate is intended for use as a base class for other classes. Users of class based on PublicPrivate can assign any keys to the object hash without interfering with keys used internally. The private data can be accessed by retrieving the private hash with the private method. For example, the following code outputs two different values, one for the public value of start and another for the private value of start.

 package ExtendedClass;
 use Class::PublicPrivate;
 @ExtendedClass::ISA=('Class::PublicPrivate');
 
 sub new{
    my $class = shift;
    my $self = $class->SUPER::new();
    my $private = $self->private;
    
    # initialize one of the private properties
    $private->{'start'}=time();
    
    return $self;
 }
 
 package main;
 my ($var);
 $var = ExtendedClass->new();
 $var->{'start'} = 1;

 print $var->{'start'}, "\n";
 print $var->private()->{'start'}, "\n";

INSTALLATION

Class::PublicPrivate can be installed with the usual routine:

        perl Makefile.PL
        make
        make test
        make install

You can also just copy PublicPrivate.pm into the Class/ directory of one of your library trees.

METHODS

YourClass->new(classname ,[initikey1=>initvalue [, ...]])

Returns an instantiation of YourClass, where YourClass is a class that extends Class::PublicPrivate. Additional key=>value pairs are stored in the private hash. Programs that use your class can store any date directly in it w/o affecting the object's private data.

$ob->private()

Returns a reference to the hash of private data.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Copyright (c) 2000 by Miko O'Sullivan. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. This software comes with NO WARRANTY of any kind.

AUTHOR

Miko O'Sullivan miko@idocs.com