gamex

I am having this issue that is driving me insane. To make things worse, I tried creating a small, test script for this post so you guys could get a feel as to how I had things set up, but my little test script works the way I expect my main script to work. The problem I am having is that I have protected variables in my class that I am trying to save to a session. For some reason, they will not. If I change them to public, it works fine. This is the test code I made to give you an idea on how my classes are set up: abstract class GeneralCart { protected $other_var = true; protected $items = array(); public function __sleep(){ return array("items"); } public function addItem($item){ $this->items[] = $item; } public function getItems(){ return $this->items; } } class Cart extends GeneralCart { // Other stuff in here } class Customer { public $cart; public function __construct(){ $this->cart = new Cart(); } } $test = new Customer(); $test->cart->addItem("ItemA"); print_r(serialize($test)); Has anyone ever run into this issue before? I actually just did a var_dump of my actual class, and I noticed something weird: ["items:protected"]=> array(0) { } But then if you scroll down a little bit ["items"]=> array(3) { // All items are here } Any ideas whats going on?

Thanks ignace, I actually have code that looks almost identical to the code you posted, I just posted what I thought was necessary for the question.

I have two classes, a Customer class, and a Cart class. Let me start by using a basic example: class Customer { public $cart // Cart class public $shipping_address // Address class public function __construct(){ $this->cart = new Cart(); $this->cart->setCustomerReference($this); } } class Cart public $customer; public function setCustReference(Customer &$customer){ $this->customer = $customer; } } I have functions in the cart class that calculates the order totals (subtotal, shipping, tax, etc), but in order to calculate tax, for example, I need to see the shipping address. I thought I would be able to pass a reference of the Customer class to the Cart when the cart is initialized. It works the way I expected, but when I call print_r on the original Customer class (not the reference) from my code, in the output it says "[cart] => Cart Object ([customer:public] => Customer Object *RECURSION*)". Is this the wrong way for me to implement this? Is there a better way, or is that recursion message just letting me know for printing to the browser reasons?

Thanks for the info. The only reason I was worried was because it could be possible for an item to have 60+ attributes, even more. I was just trying to look at the big picture and imagine how many records this table could have.

Ill try to keep this short and sweet I am creating my own shopping cart. I have an order_header table, which stores the info about the whole order (billing/shipping info, totals, etc), and an order_details table which stores information about each item. Each item is very customizable, so I have two options: 1) In the order_details table, have a field called 'item_attributes' and store a serialized array of data in the following format: array["Item_Attribute"] = item_value or 2) Create an item_attributes table with the following fields: order_detail_id attribute value Right now, each item has about 6 attributes, but it is possible for them to have 20 or more in the future once our company expands. I do not believe we will ever have to run queries searching for certain attributes. Which one of the options above is recommended in this case?