Hi all,

I'm really enjoying Dancer so far. I appreciate the effort everyone's put into it.

This will sound silly to some, but for a long time with Catalyst I was always frustrated by the stash being a hashref since it was so easy to misspell key names. However, the data in the stash is often rather
 arbitrary that it makes a touch of sense.

With the config, though, data is not arbitrary. It's defined when it's read and should generally be read-only. So I was annoyed when I wrote a test and the very first thing I did was misspell a hash key with the config. So here's what my tests look like now:

use Weborama::RTB;

use Dancer::Test;

use lib 't/lib';

use FauxObject;

my $config = FauxObject->new( Weborama::RTB::config() );

is $config->serializer, 'JSON', 'The config serializer should be JSON';

is $config->auth->username, '************',

'... and we should have an auth username';

ok defined $config->auth->pass, '... and password';

And that outputs:

t/config.t ..

ok 1 - The config serializer should be JSON

ok 2 - ... and we should have an auth username

not ok 3 - ... and password

1..3

Can't locate object method "pass" via package "FauxObject::__ANON__4".

Available methods: password, username

at t/config.t line 16.

# Failed test '... and password'

# at t/config.t line 16.

# Looks like you failed 1 test of 3.

Dubious, test returned 1 (wstat 256, 0x100)

Failed 1/3 subtests

Basically, the config hash becomes a read-only collection of objects and if you misspell a hash key (method name), you get a sensible error message and a list of the available methods.

Obviously this only works if the config can be represented as a hashref. If you have config keys which cannot be methods, such as "--foo" or something, you can still reach inside the object $config->{"--foo"}. Note that chaining hash keys works, too ($config->auth->password).

Would this be a reasonable feature for Dancer's config? If an only if the top level config is a hashref, it's blessed as a "Dancer::Config::Object". It should be transparent for the end-user, yes?

Cheers,

Ovid

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