Storing A PHP Object In A Session Variable

Question

I'm new to OOP and am writing one of my first classes. I work for an insurance broker and am trying to use a Class to store things about a quote, and store the Object as a session variable.

Thing is, when I view the session variables, I get:

sessionName         

__PHP_Incomplete_Class Object
(
    [__PHP_Incomplete_Class_Name] => myClass
    [brokerId] => 

Can anyone tell me why it's showing incomplete class name?

Answer 1

Make sure that either the class definition is present before session_start() is called, e.g.

require_once 'class.MyClass.php';
session_start();

or set an unserialize_callback_func that will try to load the class definition as described at http://docs.php.net/function.unserialize.

edit: this can also be done via spl_autoload_register(). E.g.

spl_autoload_register(function($name) {
    // only a demo ...this might be insecure ;-)
  require_once 'class.'.$name.'.php';
});
session_start();
echo '<pre>';
var_dump($_SESSION);
echo '</pre>';

Answer 2

I managed to fix it all by myself, not sure how though.

I ensured that the page displaying the values was structured like:

require_once("Class.php");
session_start();

$_SESSION['myObject']->printVariables();

And that the page constructing the object was like:

# Include the class
require_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/Class.php");

# Instantiate a new policy
$_SESSION['myObject'] = new quote('54');
$_SESSION['myObject']->printVariables();

I also made sure that the page displaying calling the object did not use any serialize functions, as they seemed to only cause errors.