Call to a member function newEmptyEntity() on null (RESOLVED)

Need Help
1

This is making me feel dumb :frowning:

I have a controller for MemberBadges, a MemberBadge can belong to a Member, and can also belong to Form28 (named for old paper based forms used to group MemberBadges)

I have an action in MemberBadgesController “addbymember”, the member_id is based as an argument and this works fine.

However an action in the same controller an action “addbyform28” with the form28_id as an argument gives an error “Call to a member function newEmptyEntity() on null”

Notice (1024) : Undefined property: MemberBadgesController::$MemberBadges in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/aal-admin2/src/Controller/MemberbadgesController.php on line 181 [in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/aal-admin2/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Controller/Controller.php, line 337]
Code
Cake\Controller\Controller::__get() /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/aal-admin2/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Controller/Controller.php, line 337
App\Controller\MemberBadgesController::addbyform28() /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/aal-admin2/src/Controller/MemberbadgesController.php, line 181

The offending bit of code is

public function addbyform28($form28Id = null)
{
    $form28sTable = $this->getTableLocator()->get('Form28s');
    $unitsTable = $this->getTableLocator()->get('Units');

    $form28 = $form28sTable->get($form28Id, [
        'contain' => [
            'MemberBadges',
            'Units',
            'Form28Statuses',
        ],
    ]);
    $unit = $unitsTable->get($form28->unit_id);

    $this->Authorization->authorize($unit, 'basicEditor');

    $memberBadge = $this->MemberBadges->newEmptyEntity(); <- THIS LINE

Sure I’m doing something dumb here…

2

Resolved on slack here

3

Since not everyone is able to click that slack link (and slack doesn’t save messages indefinitely) lets just document what is happening here:

A controllers model is usually automatically loaded by the used controllers name. So MemberBadgesController should automatically load the MemberBadges model

BUT since you accessed that controller via the URL /memberbadges/ instead of /member-badges/ it tried to load the Memberbadges table instance and set it as $this->Memberbadges instead of $this->MemberBadges

The reason why this happens is the fact, that a OS with a case-insensitive file system is used (usually Windows or MacOS have a default case-insensitive file system).

In the end I would always recommend you look at the generated routes via the debug_kit toolbar, bin/cake routes or simply generate a link via $this->Html->link() to see how to properly access a controller method :wink:

1 Like
4

Thanks @KevinPfeifer

Slowly migrating big Cake2 app to Cake4, generally baking new files etc. but some cut and pasting of code in views and missed this :frowning:

Handy for next time