Script Reloading Issue

Tom

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Jun 13, 2006, 6:42:32 PM6/13/06

to

I have a PHP framework that integrates buffering and sessions among
other things and I'm having a problem where my script will get reloaded
2 or 3 times before being output to the browser. I haven't found any
other references to this sort of problem so I thought I'd try here.

I do most my development on a Windows XP Pro desktop (running XAMPP),
so I thought maybe it was an XP-specific problem, but I just tried it
on my linux host and same thing. Here's a little log that helps
illustrate:

Session|Script Basename Datetime Split Time
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
001|01 test.php [2006 Jun 13 06:27:00] +-----+ ms
002|01 test.php [2006 Jun 13 06:27:01] +348.15 ms
003|01 test.php [2006 Jun 13 06:27:01] +265.15 ms

That's loading the page in Firefox once. Counters in the left column
are a session and static variable respectively. Other scripts will
load twice. It's especially problematic where there's something like a
email trigger involved as it will send off multiple emails where only 1
is wanted.

Anyone else encounter anything like this? Could it be a Session or
buffering problem? Something to do with logging perhaps? And why 2 or
3 times and not 7 or 8 or 1000? Any insight welcome.

Puzzled,
Tom

Tom

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Jun 13, 2006, 11:08:39 PM6/13/06

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I've narrowed my problem a bit. As part of my framework, I set various
head variables (e.g. title, character-encoding, etc.) in an array
($HEAD) and then echo them by calling a function print_html_head($HEAD)
which returns the document declaration and head portion of my web page
as a string.

So far so good. But when I now echo this string, the page reloads
three times. To wit, breakpoint before echo statement, no reload.
After echo statement, page reloads three times. Note also: the output
is buffered, so it's not being output in the browser yet. And this is
the first echo statement in the script.

Anybody have any idea what this would be symptomatic of?

Thanks,
Tom

Rik

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Jun 14, 2006, 3:28:25 AM6/14/06

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Tom wrote:
> I've narrowed my problem a bit. As part of my framework, I set
> various
> head variables (e.g. title, character-encoding, etc.) in an array
> ($HEAD) and then echo them by calling a function
> print_html_head($HEAD)
> which returns the document declaration and head portion of my web page
> as a string.
>
> So far so good. But when I now echo this string, the page reloads
> three times. To wit, breakpoint before echo statement, no reload.
> After echo statement, page reloads three times. Note also: the output
> is buffered, so it's not being output in the browser yet. And this is
> the first echo statement in the script.
>
> Anybody have any idea what this would be symptomatic of?

Incorrectly flushing the buffer?
What functions do you use to send the buffer?

Grtz,
--
Rik Wasmus

Tom

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Jun 14, 2006, 12:37:42 PM6/14/06

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I use the following code to flush the buffer as suggested at
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ob-end-flush.php:

while (ob_get_level() > 0)
{
ob_end_flush();
}

However, I just noticed a comment:

"Apart from being mostly redundant, ob_end_flush() can be downright
damaging in some weird cases..."

So maybe it has something to do with that.

What I find odd is: if I comment out the echo statement (thus removing
the document statement and head section), the script loads normally. I
thought maybe it was a syntax error, but I've run the XHTML output
through the w3C validator and it validates.

I've also tried removing the buffer flush all together and just letting
the end of the script flush it, but that doesn't seem to solve the
reloading problem.

I'll tinker and tweak further. Anyone else have this problem with
outputing a web page's head section?

Tom

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Jun 14, 2006, 6:32:58 PM6/14/06

to

Just for the record, I think I've resolved this.

The problem seems to be my <HEAD> output function. It contains 2
placeholder statements for links to an external js and css file. If I
didn't pass a value, it would print out something like this:

These blank href values in these statements were causing my script to
reload (in Firefox, at least).

Anyway, now I know. Hopefully, this will save some trouble someday for
anyone else having this problem.

Tom