The thought has passed my mind briefly, I think, but I rejected it because I do want to be able to just use MyClass; and automatically have SubClass available.
However, it turns out you're right: if I move use SubClass out of MyClass.pm it just works fine. So I've come up with this workaround:
- Have one wrapper package which loads all classes and subclasses
(so that the script useing MyClass only needs one use statement to have it all)
- Make it so that the wrapper package inherits all methods from the base class
(so that all methods on the base class work when called on the wrapper package)
- Have the base class as before, but without it useing its subclass, and now named 'BaseClass'
- Have the subclass as before, but with extends 'BaseClass' instead.
# MyClass.pm
package MyClass;
use BaseClass; # load the base class
use SubClass; # load the sub class (which now extends BaseClass)
our @ISA = qw(BaseClass); # have all BaseClass methods work on MyClass
1;
# BaseClass.pm
package BaseClass;
use Moose;
sub get_subclass_object {
return SubClass->new;
}
1;
# SubClass.pm
package SubClass;
use Moose;
extends 'BaseClass';
1;