Issues with output buffering in CakePHP

Posted by Felix Geisendörfer, on Jul 16, 2006 - in PHP & CakePHP » Core & Hacking

Output buffering is a useful way to accomblish things in php like gzipping all html output and such. A while ago I wrote about it on this blog (see "A miracle called gzip") as well.

The reason I write about it again is, that I have discovered a little issue with it in CakePHP. Because if you use:

php

ob_start ('ob_gzhandler')

or similar commands in your beforeFilter, you might suddenly notice that setting DEBUG > 1 in app/config/core.php will not give you the usal sql dump any longer. I'm not quite sure why this happens, but I think it's because CakePHP uses ob_buffering as well so there might be conflicts. The easiest solution I found is this one (this time as a complete code example):

php

if (DEBUG<2)
{
@ob_start ('ob_gzhandler');
header('Content-type: text/html; charset: UTF-8');
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate');
$offset = -1;
$ExpStr = "Expires: " .
gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s',
time() + $offset) . ' GMT';
header($ExpStr);
}

I had a hard time debugging this issue today, so I hope this might saves you the trouble I had ; ).

--Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined

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2 Comments

ThinkingPHP » A miracle called gzip on Jul 16, 2006:

[...] Update: I just found a little issue with this technique inside CakePHP. Read more about this here: Issues with output buffering in CakePHP [...]

PHPDeveloper.org on Jul 17, 2006:

ThinkingPHP: Issues with output buffering in CakePHP...

...