Thanks but the question was more like: is there a native way in mod_perl 2.0 way to process form parameters very early in the request?

Anyway, this paragraph on Apache::RequestNotes FEATURES/BUGS: "Since POST data cannot be read more than once per request, it is improper to both use this module and try to gather...", told me that our current solution is doing the right thing by slurping/processing content early on and the re-injecting in an input filter later to make content avail for later handlers and other modules (e.g. mod_proxy, etc.). It would be cool though if there was some native form-parameter handlers like Apache::RequestNotes avail for mod_perl 2.x. and that would conserve content for the rest of the cycle and other handlers. This would be very useful to translate broken content-driven APIs to more URL-driven APIs.

The reason we need to do this is because nowadays there are many API's that are called "RESTful" but that do not not use resource-based URLs so many times you need to inspect content early on to trap/route a request accordingly. Man, if people would actually understand HTTP to begin with, we would have to be constantly hacking away to make stupid code work right.