AuthComponent not available in certain controller?

Question

I have written my cake app to log in registered users and it works great on view pages where there is a db model associated with a User. However, on my main pages that aren't necessarily accessing some model (the PagesController where pages are things like upcoming events, contact us, about, etc), AuthComponent is not available, or at the least, the array returns empty---so i cannot retrieve, say, the username of the person logged in.

I tried creating a model called Page that belongsTo User but that didn't fix my problem.

To explain a little further, my app shows lists of certain lodgings, nightclubs, restaurants and things to do for a given city, all of which is shown whether a user is logged in or not. I don't understand where I am going wrong and why.

Here is my AppController:

<?php
class AppController extends Controller {
 public $components = array(
    'Session',
    'Auth' => array(
        'loginRedirect' => array('controller' => 'users', 'action' => 'view'),
        'logoutRedirect' => array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'index')
    )
);


function beforeFilter() {
    $this->Auth->allow('login', 'logout','index', 'view', 'condos', 'houses', 'hotels_and_motels', 'print_all_coupons', 'print_coupon', 'search', 'golf', 'charters', 'events', 'nightlife', 'shopping', 'visitors_info', 'contact_us');

}
}
?>

here is where I access my username in my default page layout:

<?php if(AuthComponent::user('id')) {
        echo '<span style="font-variant:small-caps">Hello, '.AuthComponent::user('username').'</span> | ';
?>

You may need to provide more code to help us get a picture of what the code base is doing. — Chuck Burgess
Using Components in views is a bad practice, undermines separation of layers in MVC. I'd $this->set("userId") in beforeRender for example to be user as $userId in all views. It is also good for performance as you access the session only once and re-use the value in a variable. — sibidiba
Thank you, that was something i was unaware of (am very new at this!). But don't you think this is moot since the user id isn't available on these pages (for whatever reason we cannot figure out) to begin with? — huzzah

huzzah huzzah · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-01T14:53:29

I have found the answer, after weeks of beating my head on the wall about this. And oh, you're gonna laugh. For any of you out there up against this problem, the answer is.....make sure there is no white space before or after your tags. That is all. Seriously. Since PHP prints out everything that isn't in a PHP tag, if it finds something to send, it will send out headers before everything else. Once headers are sent, a PHP session cannot be created. So chalk this one up to the head-smacking file!

AuthComponent not available in certain controller?

2 Answers