[Soaplite-devel] bug and comments

[Kostas C. <ko...@ch...>]

Hello,

I'd like to report a bug in SOAP::Serializer (appeared, as far as I can
tell, in version 0.65-beta6), that prevents XMLRPC::Serializer from
being subclassed. From SOAP::Serializer::encode_object

  } elsif (UNIVERSAL::isa($object => 'ARRAY')) {
      # Added in SOAP::Lite 0.65_6 to fix an XMLRPC bug
      return $self->encodingStyle eq "" ||
             ref $self eq 'XMLRPC::Serializer' ?
	  $self->encode_array($object, $name, $type, $attr) :
	  $self->encode_literal_array($object, $name, $type, $attr);

if you use My::Serializer instead of XMLRPC::Serializer, then the test
  $self eq 'XMLRPC::Serializer'
will fail and arrays will not be encoded correctly. A simple fix is to
change the test to
  UNIVERSAL::isa($self, 'XMLRPC::Serializer')


Another comment wrt subclassing the serializers: many functions call
new() on an object, due do statements of the form:
  my $self = shift->new;
As a consequence, when you subclass a serializer your constructor is
called multiple times, unless you add a test like
  return $self if ref $self;
This is an unnatural behaviour and should be written in the
documentation. Or better, these statements should be replaced by the
faster and saner:
  my $self = ref $_[0] ? shift : shift->new;
or something similar.


That's all for now. Thanks a lot for this great module. I was also
pleased to see the announcement of 0.70 and the recent activity in the
mailing list.

Kostas