SPUG: Data::Dumper for an entire package?

[rick.croote at philips.com]

Look at XML::Dumper.  It allows you to dump a data type to a file of xml format and restore the data back to the original form.  I've done this with very large hashes, and it sure makes the job very easy, but as far as a whole package, I don't know.
First, I never use a package other than an object orientated fashion, and now days limit that to a hash, which should dump nicely, but you may have problems with the fact that the hash is blessed.  However, one could copy the blessed hash to a non-blessed
hash, save it to the xml file, then allow the object to initialize itself from the xml file, or something like that.

Have Fun,
Rick Croote

Here is a working example I threw together:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use FileHandle;
use XML::DUMPER;
use Data::Dumper;

use constant objectFile => 'myObject.xml';

{
    #
    # Just some bogus data for now.
    #
    my $filedata = {
        aScalar => 1,
        aArray  => ['a', 'b'],
        aHash   => {key => 'value'}
        };

    print Dumper("Before", $filedata);
    #
    # Save it.
    #
    saveObject($filedata);

    #
    # Restore it.
    #
    $filedata = restoreObject();
    print Dumper("After", $filedata);
}

sub saveObject
{
    my ($filedata) = @_;

    my $fh = new FileHandle '>' . objectFile;
    if (defined $fh)
    {
        my $xmldump = new XML::Dumper;
        print $fh $xmldump->pl2xml($filedata);
    }
}

sub restoreObject
{
    my $parser = new XML::Parser(Style => 'Tree');
    my $xmldump = new XML::Dumper;
    my $doc = $parser->parsefile(objectFile);
    return $xmldump->xml2pl($doc);
}



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