Everything Disappears from My Web Page When

[Dan Allen]

This is not a problem or malfunction, but a question about system behavior and potential impact on integration.

When connecting to XenForo from an external app, there are certain steps that blow away whatever a browser has started to collect as a response from a url that connects to XenForo. An example is this statement, which is used in index.php and admin.php:

$fc = new XenForo_FrontController(new XenForo_Dependencies_Public());

Well, admin.php has "Admin" in the positions that say "Public" in index.php

I am sure there are others and I have not seen a case where using XenForo from a remote app does not trigger this effect. I have started making a habit of always calling to connect to XF at the start of any program that is going to be needing to work with XF. It has not been a problem so far but I am wondering what exactly is causing this behavior and whether there is a way to get work done without it happening. I can imagine scenarios where another app would do the same thing and if both that app and XF are needed by an app I am running I wonder if there is potential for irresolvable conflict, where both systems have to blow something away the other needs.

 

[Mike]

I'm not sure what situation you'd have where you'd want to be integrating XF but instantiating/running the front controller. That's for a full page view and will thus be outputting full headers, a full page with gzip, etc. You would need to call lower level methods (like model level things).

But beyond that, look at the initialization configuration you can manipulate when XenForo_Application::initialize() is called. You probably want to not reset the output buffers.

 

[Dan Allen]

Well the sending of headers is definitely what I am talking about. By stepping through the,FrontController
I have seen the headers going out being the exact thing triggering what I am taking about. I appreciate the suggestion of looking at how XenForo_Application::initialize() is manipulated. That is going to help with a lot of things I bet.

I don't know how much XenForo_Application::initialize() figures into routing, dispatching, predispatching, etc, those areas are happening and I haven't figured out how to know which objects are getting involved.

99% of the programs I write or work with don't anything in them for headers, except, I guess default headers taken care of by the server.

 

[Mike]

That's part of what I mean about the front controller being for full responses: it does routing, it outputs the entire page, it gzips the output, it outputs headers. (Though note that starting a session sends headers too.) If you're trying to integrate into another page, you likely want to work at a lower level.

That said, note that you can control the front controller to tell it to return the response content instead of outputting.