Class::DispatchToAll 0.11

Class::DispatchToAll Perl module can dispatch a method call to all inherited methods.

SYNOPSIS

package My::Class;
our @ISA=qw(SomeClass SomeOtherClass More::Classes);
use Class::DispatchToAll qw(dispatch_to_all);

my $self=bless {},My::Class # not a proper constructor, I know..

# this calls some_method in all Classes My::Class inherits from
# and all classes those classes inherit from, and all ... you get
# the point.
$self->dispatch_to_all(some_method);

# saves all return values from all calls in an array
my @returns=$self->dispatch_to_all(some_method);

See the Docs of Damian Conways Module Class::Delegation for a good introduction about Dispatching vs. Inheritance.

Class::DispatchToAll enables you to call all instantances of a method in your inheritance tree (or labyrinth..).

The standard Perl behaviour is to call only the lefternmost instance it can fing doing a depth first traversial.

Imagine the following class structure:
C
/
A B C::C
/ /
A::A D
/
My::Class

Perl will try to find a method in this mess in this order:

My::Class -> A::A -> A -> B -> D -> B -> C::C -> C
(Note that it will look twice in B because B is a parent of both A::A and D))

As soon as Perl finds the method somewhere, it will short-circuit out of its search and invoke the method.

And that is exactly the behaviour Class::DispatchToAll changes.

If you use dispatch_to_all (provided by Class::DispatchToAll) to call your method, Perl will look in all of the aforementioned packages and run all the methods it can find. It will even collect all the return values and return them to you as an array, if you want it too.