session side-effect/global warning

bunner_bob

I'm getting this error message:
Unknown: Your script possibly relies on a session side-effect which existed until PHP 4.2.3. Please be advised that the session extension does not consider global variables as a source of data, unless register_globals is enabled. You can disable this functionality and this warning by setting session.bug_compat_42 or session.bug_compat_warn to off, respectively file: Unknown (line 0)

I have register_globals disabled in .htaccess, and I'm not using session_register(), session_unregister() or session_is_registered().

How else might I be inadvertently trying to use a global var as a source of session data? I'd post code but it's a CMS, so there are a fair number of interconnected parts - hard to know what to post. So I guess it's more of a general question - what kinds of typos or bad code practice might be triggering this?

dagon

with a 3rd party script you are usually better of asking in its own support forum (assuming it has one)

bunner_bob

Sorry - wasn't clear. It's my own CMS - so I guess I'm the support forum 🙂 Or not, in this case...

bunner_bob

But to offer a bit more info, it only seems to happen on one page of the site. This is a multi-state page (a shopping cart checkout page) on the admin side of the site (no errors on the public version of the site). It only seems to happen during one state of the page.

In other words, the page contains:

State 1: edit/update address (submit ->)
State 2: enter credit card info (submit ->)
State 3: review/confirm order (submit ->)
State 4: create/process order & display success

It's submitting State 1/loading State 2 that triggers it. But not every time. There's no white space outside the PHP tags in the main page, nor in any of the classes that are called during the submit State 1/load State 2 process. The first lines of PHP (with no whitespace before) are:

ini_set('session.save_handler', 'files');
session_start();

which are part of a common include that's in every admin page with no errors anywhere else.

So are there other mistakes or typos that might be contributing to this problem?

bunner_bob

I've managed to track it down a bit more. It seems that when I try to capture a returned array $message from a class instance, it triggers the error:

class submitAddress extends submitBase
{
	protected $messagePrefix = 'Customer information ';

function __construct($dao, $fieldarray)
{
	$this->dao = $dao;
	$this->fieldarray = $fieldarray;

	parent::__construct();
}

public function doSubmit()
{
	if (!empty($this->fieldarray[$this->pkey]))
	{
		$this->dao->updateRecord($this->fieldarray);
	}
	else
	{
		$this->fieldarray = $this->dao->insertRecord($this->fieldarray);
	}


	$this->setMessagePrefix();

	$message = $this->dao->getMessage();
	$message['message_content'] = $this->messagePrefix . $message['message_content'];

	return $message;
}
}


require_once(LOCAL_INCLUDE_PATH . 'classes/submitAddress.class.php');
$submit = new submitAddress($data, $fieldarray);
$message = $submit->doSubmit();

But when I don't try to capture it - no error:

require_once(LOCAL_INCLUDE_PATH . 'classes/submitAddress.class.php');
$submit = new submitAddress($data, $fieldarray);
$submit->doSubmit();

Now there may in certain cases on this site be a session variable called "message", but I'm not trying to access that - am I...? Does PHP think I am?