Home » Structures » OLE » Bug #483

[2003-12-23 03:33 UTC] spammable at howsfamily dot net

Description:
------------
I had a problem on my system with another PEAR module creating 0-byte files. It turned out that the problem was that the OLE library, which it depended on, reported an error opening a temporary file.

When I looked through the OLE code in Root.php, I found a number of references to $this->_FILEH_, but I never found a place where this was assigned to.

I added the line

$this->_FILEH_ = fopen($this->_tmp_filename, "r+w");

at line 100 in Root.php, and everything worked. I'm not sure if this is idiosyncratic to my own system, or more widespread. It strikes me as a very obvious bug.

[2003-12-23 10:57 UTC] xnoguer at php dot net

What version of OLE are you using? The latest version of OLE has this line on Root.php:

$this->_FILEH_ = @fopen($this->_tmp_filename,"w+b");

[2003-12-23 12:21 UTC] spammable at howsfamily dot net

I'm using OLE 0.5, and you're right, that line does exist. My only interaction OLE is through the a third party module, Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer, so I haven't really gone through the depths of it. But the line you refer to occurs in an "else" clause:

//Lines 97-107
if (($filename == '-') or ($filename == ''))
...
else
{
$this->_FILEH_ = @fopen($filename, "wb");
...
}

However, the section in the "if" clause still makes reference to _FILEH_:

//Line 101-102
if ($this->_FILEH_ == false)
return $this->raiseError("Can't create temporary file.");

Without _FILEH_ being assigned to, this will always be falsem and thus always raise the error.

As I said, I haven't really gone through your code, so it simply may be that the excel module invokes your code incorrectly, but I found that adding a line to open the file in the "if" clause solved my problem. I'm not sure if it translates from my specific problem to the general case.

[2003-12-24 10:30 UTC] xnoguer at php dot net

The if block is:

if (($filename == '-') or ($filename == ''))
{
$this->_tmp_filename = tempnam($this->_tmp_dir, "OLE_PPS_Root");
$this->_FILEH_ = @fopen($this->_tmp_filename,"w+b");
if ($this->_FILEH_ == false) {
return $this->raiseError("Can't create temporary file.");
}
}

so $this->_FILEH_ does get assigned anyway. Only problem is, if you don't have permissions for the default temp dir and haven't set another dir with setTempDir() it will fail.

I know that if you are using Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer you don't have a way to set the temp dir to be used by OLE (yet). I'm the maintainer for Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer too, and there is a setTempDir() method in cvs, but I can't make a release now.
Please check my answer to bug #482. If that solves your problem I'll close this bug and keep that one open.

[2003-12-24 10:43 UTC] spammable at howsfamily dot net

Yes, I edited my copy of Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer to set the temporary directory. If the "if" clause you quoted is right, it looks like I must have accidentally modified my copy when I was dicking around with getting it to work. Sorry about that, feel free to close the bug.