By CryHaven12 on

Hi People,

i encountered some peculiarities with the $user object in my code, am hoping to seek some enlightenment from the community for a clearer understanding.

A part of my code displays a form with its own validation and submission function:

myform_form()
myform_form_validate()
myform_form_submit()

within all these 3 functions, i have been saving and updating some data inside the $user object.

within myform_form_validate(), I've the following code in.

global $user;

if ( isset($user->count) ) 
	$count = array('count' => ($user->count+1));
	
user_save($user, $count);

then in myform_form_submit(), I need to read up in these newly saved data again from the user object, as follow:

global $user;

$counter = $user->count;

I eventually have a problem of $counter not displaying the latest data which i have previously saved in $user->count. For instance, if I have incremented $user->count to '2' inside myform_form_validate(), this incrementing will not have been reflected inside myform_form_submit(). the $user->count will still give 1, before incrementing. Is there something im not understanding about global $user?

I did my own debugging, and replaced global $user in myform_form_submit() with the following 

global $user;
$user = user_load(array('uid' => $user->uid));

$counter = $user->count;

then it works! ... $user->count is now 2. Why is this happening? It seems that global $user is loading old values, and not reading new values from the database.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

$user is cached for the logged in user, on a page load of there is a copy of $user in cache it is not reloaded.

CryHaven12’s picture

CryHaven12 commented

so everytime when a user logs in, a cache is made for $user of that particular user?

drawk’s picture

drawk commented

The global $user object doesn't change within a single page request, unless something changes it. This is its advantage. In your original code you are saving the the change to $count out to the db, but you aren't modifying the global user object so that change won't be reflected until the next user_load, which will not happen on the global $user object until the next page request. Change your original code to

global $user;

if ( isset($user->count) )
$count = array('count' => ($user->count+1));

$user->count = $count;
user_save($user, $count);
CryHaven12’s picture

CryHaven12 commented

I see what you mean ... that helps a lot. Thanks for your enlightenment!

By the way ... shouldn't it be 


global $user;

if ( isset($user->count) )
$count = array('count' => ($user->count+1));

$user->count = $user->count+1;
user_save($user, $count);

since $count contains an array?

Lastly, am i right to say that saving into the user db can only occur after user_save()?