[OT] Perl OO Question.

[McGlinchy, Alistair]

Hi All,

I have a noddy OO question.

I am trying to OO-ify some file grepping code.  Every so often files
appear in a directory and they all need the same generic tasks performed
on them (scan for useful data, export stats into a standard format,
maybe update RRD files, compress and move it to an archive). However the
actual file formats varies enormously so I need bespoke code for each
file type.  I have this stub below from a working mock-up, but it just
seems wrong to me.  

Surely a call to MainframeFile->new() must return a MainframeFile
object; or is it ok to return a subclass of MainframeFile?
I'm not even sure that MainframeFile should be allowed to "use"
MainframeFile::SNI and MainframeFile::CCU at all. It seems backward.
Perhaps I need a separate class that knows about MainframeFile,
MainframeFile::SNI and MainframeFile::CCU and does the choice for me.
If so what would it look like?

Cheers,

Alistair


package MainframeFile;
use MainframeFile::SNI;
use MainframeFile::CCU;
# Etc..

sub new {
    my $class = shift;
    my $self = bless {}, $class;

    my $file_name= shift;
    $self->set_file_name($file_name);

    # Check for special cases 
    my $sub_self;
    $sub_self =  MainframeFile::SNI->new($self) and return $sub_self;   
    $sub_self =  MainframeFile::CCU->new($self) and return $sub_self;

    # Not a special case. Return the normal class
    return $self;  
}

sub compress {}
sub archive {}



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2005