Plugin help-- need to store state

[peter]

Hi. Were writing an in house plugin. Our SA version is 3.1.5.  Basically we 
have a lot of rules
based on data from a database. We want to hit the data base once and
then have all the rules beable to check the data to score accordingly
similar to how Bayes works.

>From reading the M::SA::Plugin docs, it seems the check_start  call back is a 
>good plate  to set state and the PerMsgStatus object is where to store it. So 
>we have this;

sub check_start {
    
    my ($self, $pms) = @_;
        $pms->{CAFEREP}{from_avg_score} = 2.0;
}

When we access $pms->{CAFEREP}{from_avg_score} in our eval rule,  we get
an error saying it is uninitialized. 

So, do we need to call check_start on our own somewhere? The docs say it
is a callback that SA calls.

thanks for any help.

Peter