How to use autodie with non-builtins?

Question

The autodie documentation hints that it is possible to use it for other functions than those built-ins which it can handle by default, but there are no clear examples how to do that in it.

Specifically I would like to use it for the Imager module. A lot of the functions and methods of that can fail, and I would prefer if that wouldn't mean that my code will be littered with or die Imager|$image->errstr; phrases all over.

Of course, if there's another way than using autodie to achieve that, I would be interested in that too.

Answer 1

autodie only works with functions, not methods. This is because it's lexically scoped, and method lookup can't be lexically scoped. autodie::hints explains how to tell autodie about user-defined functions, but that won't do anything for methods.

I don't know of any way to get autodie-like behavior for methods, unless the module has that built in (e.g. DBI's RaiseError).

You could have a subroutine to do the check, but it wouldn't save all that much code, since you'd still have to pass it the correct object or class to call errstr on.