Setting Perl module parameters and using Exporter at the same time

Question

When using Perl modules, there is sometimes a little bit of configuration required. In such cases, I am implementing a custom import function in my module. (Pragmas are omitted for brevity).

Api.pm

package Api;

# Default settings
my %PARAMS = (
     name => 'google',
     url => 'www.google.com'
);

sub import {
    my ( $pkg , %args )= @_;
    while ( my ($k,$v) = each %args ) {
        $PARAMS{$k} = $v;
}

sub some_method {
   # ...
}

sub another_method {
   # ...
}

Doing that, I can easily configure it when using it in a script.

script.pl

use Api ( name => 'stackoverflow', url => 'http://stackoverflow.com' );

But now I also want to export the module function some_method. Normally you do this using the Exporter module. But inheriting from this module overwrites my implementation of import.

From the client point of view, I had something in mind like

 use Api ( name => 'stackoverflow', 
           url => 'http://stackoverflow.com' ,
           import => [ 'some_method' ,'another_method' , ... ] );

But here I am stuck.

How can I use Exporter in my module Api.pm to export the functions?

Can I use it at all?

Answer 1

In the example, I used a hash reference as the first argument to use Api:

package Api;

use warnings;
use strict;

use Exporter;
our @EXPORT_OK = qw{ test };

my $params;

sub import {
    $params = splice @_, 1, 1;
    goto &Exporter::import
}

sub test {
    print $params->{test}, "\n";
}

1;

Testing code:

use Api { test => scalar localtime }, qw{ test };
test();