CakePHP not loading associated properties with model on production server - cakephp

Question

This is a weird one.
I have a local server on which I develop apps. A product review app I developed works flawlessly on it, and utilizes Cake's associative modeling ($hasMany, $belongsTo, et. al.).
After pushing this app up to a production server, it fails. Gives me an error message:
Notice (8): Undefined property: AppModel::$Product [APP/controllers/reviews_controller.php, line 46]
ReviewsController::home() - APP/controllers/reviews_controller.php, line 46
Dispatcher::_invoke() - CORE/cake/dispatcher.php, line 204
Dispatcher::dispatch() - CORE/cake/dispatcher.php, line 171
[main] - APP/webroot/index.php, line 83
I've debug()'d $this and it shows, plain as day, that, while the local server is loading the associated models, the production server is not. The databases are mirror duplicates (literally, the production server was imported from the dev db), and I can manually load models, which tells me it's connecting to the DB just fine.
What on Earth is going on?
UPDATE
The sql query from the production server is this:
SELECT `Review`.`id`, `Review`.`title`, `Review`.`product_id`, `Review`.`score`, `Review`.`submitted`, `Review`.`reviewed`, `Review`.`right`, `Review`.`wrong`, `Review`.`user_id`, `Review`.`goals`
FROM `reviews`
AS `Review`
WHERE 1 = 1
ORDER BY `Review`.`submitted` desc LIMIT 10
The sql query from the dev server is this:
SELECT `Review`.`id`, `Review`.`title`, `Review`.`product_id`, `Review`.`score`, `Review`.`submitted`, `Review`.`reviewed`, `Review`.`right`, `Review`.`wrong`, `Review`.`user_id`, `Review`.`goals`, `User`.`id`, `User`.`username`, `Product`.`id`, `Product`.`name`
FROM `reviews`
AS `Review`
LEFT JOIN `users` AS `User` ON (`Review`.`user_id` = `User`.`id`)
LEFT JOIN `products` AS `Product` ON (`Review`.`product_id` = `Product`.`id`)
WHERE 1 = 1
ORDER BY `Review`.`submitted` desc LIMIT 10
UPDATE 2
Here's some of the code the errors point to:
$title = $this->Review->Product->find( 'first', array( 'fields' => array( 'Product.name' ), 'conditions' => array( 'Product.id' => $filter ) ) );
UPDATE 3
<?php
class Review extends AppModel {
var $name = 'Review';
var $displayField = 'title';
//The Associations below have been created with all possible keys, those that are not needed can be removed
var $belongsTo = array(
'User' => array(
'className' => 'User',
'foreignKey' => 'user_id',
'conditions' => '',
'fields' => '',
'order' => ''
),
'Product' => array(
'className' => 'Product',
'foreignKey' => 'product_id',
'conditions' => '',
'fields' => '',
'order' => ''
)
);
}
?>

Answer 1

I had this problem, and for me it was due to a missing field in one of the database tables. I'd triple-check to make sure both DB's are exactly the same (although you said they were...): feel free to use this 7-year-old app to check them :D http://www.mysqldiff.org/
Other people with this issue talked about filename issues and that all files should be lowercased, so that may be something to check as well...

Answer 2

Actually - from a quick glance it might be worth using containable to make sure your data calls are consistent.
If you don't want to go through the hassle of adding containable (but I would urge you to do so - it is one my favourite features of cakephp), you may want to set recursive in your find() call just to make sure the associated models are loaded.

Answer 3

Do you have a way of looking at the files on the server without going through ftp? I had a problem similar to this where the timestamps were messed up on the files and the server would not update the file. I had to delete the files, and then re upload them. You may have already tried this but I just thought I would suggest the possibility. Maybe some of those files are outdated on the server.
Have a great day!

Answer 4

Can you pastebin the Review model, Product model, AppModel, AppController, and the controller you are getting the error from.
The line:
Notice (8): Undefined property: AppModel::$Product [APP/controllers/reviews_controller.php, line 46]
Seems to indicate the Review Model is loading the AppModel and not the file you want it to. In that case the Review model won't have a Product association.

Answer 5

you can print the stacktrace out to see, here's some code I snatch from php.net
echo "<div>Stack<br /><table border='1'>";
$aCallstack=debug_backtrace();
echo "<thead><tr><th>file</th><th>line</th><th>function</th><th>args</th></tr></thead>";
foreach($aCallstack as $aCall)
{
if (!isset($aCall['file'])) $aCall['file'] = '[PHP Kernel]';
if (!isset($aCall['line'])) $aCall['line'] = '';
echo "<tr><td>{$aCall['file']}</td><td>{$aCall['line']}".
"</td><td>{$aCall['function']}</td><td>";
debug (($aCall['arg']));
echo "</td></tr>";
}
echo "</table></div>";
die();
It's gonna be hard looking through all that though.