Question

Let’s say a web application store an object of class My_Object in the php session, under the name ‘myobject’. When I open another php application where this class doesn’t exist, Zend_Session::start() throw an exception when attempting to unserialize My_Object.

Thus, I need to clean the $_SESSION variable to get rid of ‘myobject’. But to clean $_SESSION variable, I first need to call session_start() and once it has been called, Zend_Session::start() throws the following exception :

Uncaught exception ‘Zend_Session_Exception’ with message ‘session has already been started by session.auto-start or session_start()’

This is thrown even if I class session_destroy() before calling Zend_Session::start().

Can anyone help me on this ?

Thanks by advance,

Eric.

EDIT : To add clarification, here is the function I call on my controller initializer plugin :

    protected function _initSession() {
        try {
            session_start();

            unset($_SESSION['myobject']);

            session_destroy();

            Zend_Session::start(); // throws an exception !!!
        }
        catch (Exception $e) {
            echo $e; exit;
        }
    }

EDIT 2 :

To add further clarification, here is the exception thrown by Zend_Session::start() when it encounters an unknown class :

Warning: include_once(My/Object.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/local/zend/share/ZendFramework/library/Zend/Loader.php on line 146

Now that I’ve written this, I wonder if I sould start the session before instanciating the Zend autoloader…

Answer 1

OK, sorry for to answer my own question but it looks like I misunderstood the exception thrown by Zend_Session. The problem actually came from Zend_Loader and not the underlying PHP session. The fact was that I was instanciating Zend autoloader in index.php, which is not a good idea since from the moment it is instanciated, Zend_Loader will try to autoload every class that has not been explicitly included [EDIT : To be clearer, it will try to instanciate every class whode name begins by one of the namespaces registered – and in my code, I had the namespace “My_” registered with the zend loader…]

The solution is pretty simple : instanciate Zend_Loader after Zend:Session::start(). I just put the initialization of Zend_Loader in my bootstrap, after Zend_Session::start() and everything works flawlessly : My_Object class is unserialized by Zend_Session::start() as stdClass (thanks to drew010 for pointing me in the right direction); which is what is excepted.

Thanks for your help, guys.