I today found out a strange thing about the PHP4 object/variable handling that I can not understand.

My main script first clones a provider class and stores the new object into $MAINPROV;

Then it includes two files that give back two elements of the page.

My provider class has some subclasses. These shall be loaded on demand with functions like getFooProvider(). Theese functions test via <pre>is_object($this->FOO)</pre> if the class is already loaded. If not it includes the file containing the class definition and spawns <pre>$this->FOO = new foo($this)</pre>.

Now listen to this: If I use the load-function in the main script all works fine. But if the class is loaded from one of the subclasses (into the main provider class object that is a variable in the main script) it cannot be accessed in the other subscript, the second element. This causes the foo-class-file to be reloaded and throws out an error message because the class is already defined.

If anybody can help, it would be very very sad if I had to workaround pre-loading every subclass that can be used on this page, because I wanted to make it dynamically load the classes. Thanks!