KohanaPHP » Kohana v3.x » Auth

I noticed some strange behaviour when I upgraded my site to Kohana 3.2 from 3.1.x. After logging into my application, my application still registered as not being logged in and upon inspecting the session data, there was no user data but just an empty Model_User object. I traced through the code and noticed that in the class defined as:

abstract class Kohana_Auth

the complete_login function is defined as this:

protected function complete_login($user)
{
    // Regenerate session_id
    $this->_session->regenerate();

// Store username in session
    $this->_session->set($this->_config['session_key'], $user);

return TRUE;
    }

On inspecting the type of the $user variable it turned out to be Model_User which struck me as odd because usually if you're going to keep a PHP object in the session you would usually perform some kind of serialisation to preserve the data, but with the code above, up until the point of saving in the session, the user data was intact, but after that all the data was lost.

I'm using PHP 5.3.4 on my local development computer and don't know if the PHP version has something to do with it. But I've changed that now to be this:

protected function complete_login($user)
{
    // Regenerate session_id
    $this->_session->regenerate();

// Store username in session
    $this->_session->set($this->_config['session_key'], $user->as_array());

return TRUE;
    }

and convert the array data into a Model_User object when retrieving it to check for a logged in state. Now my login works as it did before!

This issue needs to be investigated and resolved for the next release of Kohana