Miles Johnson

Pitfalls within Cake's Cache engine

For the past week I have been working on a DataSource for the WeGame API. Everything was working fine until I added some logic to cache the results. No matter what I did I received the following fatal error:

//Fatal error: Call to a member function init() on a non-object in C:\xampp\htdocs\cake_1.2.5\cake\libs\cache.php on line 195
// Line 195
$_this->_Engine[$engine]->init($settings);

The error was being thrown from within Cache::set() and it seemed to fail because the actual storage engine object was not instantiated. I spent a good couple hours trying to track down the bug, but to no avail. I tried removing Cache::set(), placing Cache::config() within config/core.php, but still nothing.

Finally I thought to myself "Let me check my Config settings", so I did. I noticed that Cache.disable was set to true, and once I set it to false the whole system worked! Bah, pretty annoying right? I sure love Cake, but its error and exception handling isn't that great. I've ran into so many of these case scenarios where a simple trigger_error() or uncaught exception would of helped (This is for you Cake team *cough*2.0*cough*).

Another thing I would like to note, is that the path option in Cache::config() does not actually create the folder, you must do that manually. Here's how I resolved that problem.

$cachePath = CACHE .'we_game'. DS;
// Create the cache dir
if (!file_exists($cachePath)) {
	$this->Folder = new Folder();
	$this->Folder->create($cachePath, 0777);
}
Cache::config('weGame', array('path' => $cachePath));