This has been a puzzler for me for some time, so hopefully someone can edify me.
I have a pure Perl driver on which I'm doing some serious refactoring (removing 6 years of accumulated cruft), and added a simple function to build $sth's from an input argument hash. Since most of the arguments are just $sth attributes, I simply called $sth = DBI::_new_sth($dbh, \%args); which works fine...until I later attempt to call $sth->_set_fbav() to stash a row, where it chokes with "NUM_OF_FIELDS probably isn't set right". After verifying everything is where I expect it to be, I run with DBI::PurePerl...and it runs just fine. So after a lot of trial & error messing about with _new_sth(), I discover I can pass in all of my argument hash *except* NUM_OF_FIELDS; it has to be set *after* I create the $sth...even tho I've set all of NUM_OF_PARAMS/NAME/TYPE/PRECISION/etc. in the call to _new_sth(). Is this a bug, or is there a reason for this ? If the latter, is it documented anywhere ? As the author of several pure Perl DBD's, (and hopefully a few more in the near future), I've always worked around this with lots of explicit per-field assignment code that could've/should've just been passed to the constructor. Even if I have to leave that code in place, it would be nice to understand why... - Dean
