Question

Apologies, It looks like my original question was not able to correctly explain what I am doing and what I want to achieve. Here is an updated question.

This may be the easiest question, but I can’t find an answer anywhere.

I have a large Perl module (say ABC.pm) which keeps on growing day by day as we add new functions. Most of these functions (almost 90%) send requests and process responses. Here is some code for one such request.

sub UserDeleteRequest
{
    my ($self, $inputParam) = @_;
    my $config = $self->getConfig();
    return $self->_doRequest (REQUEST => 'UserDeleteRequest',
                              PARAM => $inputParam));
}

Similar to this, other functions are written and it keeps on growing as we add new requests.

Having a large file is becoming difficult to maintain. So, I am looking for some best practices to make this easier. One idea that I thought of was to split this large module into multiple files (how??)

Answer 1

If the subs are really very similar, why not generalize into ONE sub?

my %validRequests = map {($_ => 1)} qq(UserDeleteRequest);

sub SendRequest {
    my ($self, $request, $inputParam) = @_;
    my $config = $self->getConfig();
    return undef unless $validReqiests{$request}; # If want to verify
    # 
    $inputParam = getInputParamDefault($request) unless $inputParam; 
    return $self->_doRequest (REQUEST => $inputParam,
                              PARAM => $inputParam));
}

If there are other logical differences between some types of subs, you can address them by either doing proper OO with inheritance, as Ilion’s answer notes; or you can do the simpler approach of having a per-request-type hashes of helper sub references in simpler cases.

I added a special getInputParamDefault() call get to address your comment “Sometimes caller of the function does not provide $inputParam then we have to find the default one and pass it to _doRequest subroutine.”

---

UPDATE: If you MUST keep the original sub names due to legacy code calling them that you can’t refactor, you can auto-generate them (either using AUTOLOAD or by adding to namespace by hand):

# Code not tested.
my %requestSubNames = ("UserDeleteRequest" => "UserDeleteRequest");
foreach my $requestType (sort keys %requestSubNames) {
    no strict 'refs';
    my $subName = __PACKAGE__ . "::$requestSubNames{$requestType}";
    *{$subname} = sub { return $_[0]->SendRequest($requestType, $_[1]); };
        # Note - this may need to be closure-tweaked, it's 5am and I'm a bit asleep
    # Add to EXPORT/EXPORT_OK if needed
}