Undefined method stdClass::user() error when using CakePHP Auth

Question

Hi there,

I'm fairly new to CakePHPand am building a site using the Auth component. A couple of times I have tried to do things with this component which have caused the error

Fatal error: Call to undefined method stdClass::user() in /ftphome/site/app/controllers/users_controller.php on line 395

The line it refers to in this case is

$this->User->read(null, $this->Auth->user('id'));

This error does not disappear when I revert the code back to how it was before the error and I only seem to be able to get rid of it by removing some files on the server (I'm not sure which files, when I tried removing all files in the tmp directory the error persisted so I removed the entire site and restored from the latest svn revesion.

In this particular case I think I caused the error by putting the following code in app_controller

class AppController extends Controller {
    function beforeRender() {
        $this->set('test', $this->Auth->user());
    }
}

Which I copied from this thread http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php/browse_thread/thread/ee9456de93d2eece/cff6fe580d13622b?lnk=gst&q=auth

A previous time I caused the issue by attempting to update the Auth user details after updating the user in the database.

I can see I'm somehow removing the user object from the Auth object but I can't understand why I need to delete files in the site to get it back or how the code above removes it - any help would be much appreciated.

Edit

It looks like in the case I mentioned above, the problem was the app_controller.php file which I'd copied into my app/controllers directory. Just having the file with an empty class declaration causes this error - can anyone provide further insight?

Further edit

I've realised I've been a bit silly and the problem was caused by me putting app_controller.php in /app/controllers/app_controller.php when there was already one in /app/app_controller.php - thanks for the input though Andy, it helps me understand a bit more what was happening.

Answer 1

This error is normally thrown when a class instance (in your case an instance of Auth) has been serialised to disk, then re-read/deserialised in another request but the class definition (i.e. Auth) has not been loaded yet, so PHP creates it as an "stdClass" (standard class.)

When you remove your site files, you're removing the session storage (IIRC it's the Cache folder in a CakePHP app) so at the next request, a new session is created from scratch.

It's been a while since I last used CakePHP (I switched to Zend) so I cannot remember if Cake includes files it requires using an __autoload function or not.

On that mailing list post, someone says that you can this $this->Auth->user() in a view, but in the controller, you can use $session->read('Auth.User') to get the user component. Not sure what the difference is, maybe $this->Auth is a view helper, so isn't available in the controller?