General help

Can you get them to just switch off the notices?   Things might be working fine anyway, and there's no need to print notices to the browser.

Thanks Petr, today was the first I heard of PHP 4.4.0 , let alone problems with it...

Can people having problems please get the latest ADOdb library from here and use it to totally replace the moodle/lib/adodb directory you have in your Moodle. See if that helps and get back to us ASAP.

Hi Stacey,

I first experienced this problem after Powweb updated their php to 4.4 - did you notice the same thing?

Have you spoken with anyone in the Powweb chat room support? Please do and ask if they have any solutions. I went in last week looking for help, but they suggested it was a developer's problem....

Let me know how it goes....

Sharon Peters

Thanks, Scott!!   

John Lim was quick! Can someone verify for me that ADOdb 4.65 works out of the box with Moodle on PHP 4.4.0 ? If it works fine I'll add the new ADOdb to Moodle 1.5.3 and get that out straight away.

Thanks Julian, that worked perfectly!

function GetAssoc($force_array = false, $first2cols = false )

Hi,

first of all, I must drop a BIG ALARM here! Inside moodle/lib/adodb/adodb.inc.php there are TWO GetAssoc() functions! Looking at code, they are:

function &GetAssoc($sql, $inputarr=false,$force_array = false, $first2cols = false)

and:

function &GetAssoc($force_array = false, $first2cols = false)

And, if I'm not wrong you are "mixing them" in this discussion, perhaps causing some troubles!

After reading a bit about the problem (in PHP bugs and some info from jonlim's blog, it seems that, under PHP 4.4 and PHP 5.1 (and above), results of a function can be returned by reference only if they are references.

Coming back to both functions above, the first one is a method under the ADOConnection class and the second one is a method under the ADORecordSet class.

The first one seems to properly return a reference to an array (see the line before the return), so it shouldn't be a problem.

But the second one returns just directly an array and that's exactly the "forbidden fruit" under PHP 4.4.0 and up! So the function to be patched is exactly

function &GetAssoc($force_array = false, $first2cols = false)

Anyway, perhaps it could be better to, instead of changing the declaration of the function from reference to value, causing copies of really BIG (result sets!) objects to be created all the time (and causing some potential problems if such objects have to be modified in other scopes) to change the function a bit in order to make it returns references instead of values.

To do so, I suggest this change, just modify the:

return $results;

line at the end of the function above to:

$refresults =& $results;

return $refresults;

Doing this we have created a pointer (reference) to the $results array and such reference will be returned by the function (accomplishing PHP 4.4.0 new laws).

IMPORTANT WARNING: My suggested change hasn't been tested at all (because I haven't found any 4.4.0 version for my Mac) and it's 100% hypothetical (looking the code it could cause other problems like "pointers to pointers"...) so, my personal recommendations are:

- For MOODLERS: Use the simpler change from:

function GetAssoc($force_array = false, $first2cols = false)

to

function GetAssoc($force_array = false, $first2cols = false)

- For DEVELOPERS: Analyse my suggested change, perhaps it's the correct way, perhaps no. Only one idea...

Ciao

PD: I hope I'm not doing things more and more confusing, and that the function to change is the one I've showed you here. I apologises for not being able to test it! Any feedback (patch applied, OS, PHP and Moodle versions) will be absolutely welcome, of course!

Martin,
Could this be related to the HTML editor problem?  Everything worked for me in Moodle 1.5.2 until the PHP change.  Fixing adodb.inc.php allowed me to log in, but ever since the HTML editor has been broken.  If I turn on debug, the only message I get is:
Notice: Only variable references should be returned by reference in /home/uzujbmi/public_html/moodle/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 73

But it doesn't seem to be affecting anything on the site.  The help for the HTML editor still appears, just no editor!

Others have reported that changing hosting services fixed this.  I suppose.  But next semester we are going to host it ourselves, so I want to stick with my current host until then (even though their support is particularly bad).  Is there another solution short of going back to an earlier version of PHP?

Hey,

during installation of my moodle 1.5.2 + stable I received the upper error message:

Notice: Only variable references should be returned by reference in /home... 

Then I found this thread an read it attentive. Then I only changed the one line in moodle/lib/adodb/adodb.inc.php by removing the &:

function &GetAssoc($sql, $inputarr=false,$force_array = false, $first2cols = false)

to this:

function GetAssoc($sql, $inputarr=false,$force_array = false, $first2cols = false)

and now my moodle works fine.

Thanks to you all of you for the great support!

Greetings from Germany!
Peter

I'm afraid the problems could be much deeper seated than others have yet realised.

Has anyone, under PHP 4.40:

1. Installed Moodle from scratch? (I've tried and it can't get past variables).

2. Tried to create a new course on an existing installation? (All my Moodles fail with an error).

Latest Moodle, fix applied (several times, all suggestions).

I found this interesting discussion:

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=33558

There appear to me to be many more "references calling references' in adodb.inc, which surface when you attempt the above.

Has anyone else found these problems? I'm on a different host, which has previously been exemplary.

Nicole,

Have you tried accessing the site from another computer and web browser?  We noticed the session timeout issue a few times after making the fix.  Clearing the cache and even using another computer worked around the issue.  If it does not fix the problem, try using the attached file that incorporates the correct fix.

Scott

ADOdb 4.66 worked on my site .

Hello,

In order to remove this error message and its related problems:

Notice: Only variable references should be returned by reference in /home/petesweb/public_html/moodle/lib/adodb/adodb.inc.php on line 2689

I have replaced the adodb.inc.php file with the same file from the Latest Stable Branch. Was this the right thing to do?

Like many of the people in the above thread, I also woke up this morning to find that my ISP (Bluehost) had upgraded PHP. I assume this is the case because I got the above error message on all four of my moodle sites:

Since I am not a programmer, I felt certain that I'd not be able to solve the problem any time soon. However, I did search for 'adodb.inc.php' and found this thread and, thanks to the above posts, the problem appears to have been solved. However, my solution was simply to replace the old adodb.inc.php file with the latest version. I did not change any of the code. Was this the right thing to do, and should I make any other changes?

Any advice will be much appreciated.

Moodle version: 1.5.2 +
PHP version: 4.4.1