Problem in DB_result::free()

I just ran into a nasty little bug in DB_result::free(). This took me forever to track down, but I think I found the problem and the solution. Here's some code snippets from a class I'm working on: $this->db = &DB::connect($this->params, true); $query = "select * from foo"; $result = $this->db->query($query); if (isset($result)) { $row = $result->fetchRow(); if ($row && ($row[0] == '1')) { $result->free(); return true; } $result->free(); } Alright, that's pretty much all that's relevant. Now, from what I could tell, this code would work the first time through and fail fatally each time thereafter with a "Can't invoke method from non-object" kind of error on the $this->db->query() line. I eventually tracked the problem back to the $result->free() calls. I didn't see how that was affecting the $this->db class (DB_result is its own class, afterall) until I looked closer at the DB_result::free() method: function free() { $err = $this->dbh->freeResult($this->result); if (DB::isError($err)) { return $err; } $this->dbh = $this->result = false; return true; } Well, apparently, when it sets $this->dbh = false, it ends up following the reference all the way back to my class and kills my database handle. Well, that's super. Removing '$this->dbh' from that line makes everything work happily. Am I misinterpretting something here? Is this really a bug or the intended behavior? I figure it's generally safe to free result sets all I want without it affected my database handle. -- Jon Parise (jon@csh.rit.edu) . Rochester Inst. of Technology http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jon/ : Computer Science House Member