Warning in Varien/Autoload + Solution

I have recently been putting together a system that needed to interact with Magento.

A big issue that I came across was a warning similar to this

Warning: include(): Failed opening ‘Model/Base.php’ for inclusion (include_path=‘…’) in /path/to/magento/lib/Varien/Autoload.php on line 93

As I was running with an error handler that turned all errors into exceptions this prevented the code from running.

The issue was due to my code using a custom autoloader, and when the Varien auto-loader was called first it could not find the files which triggered a warning.

There are multiple ways of getting round this - see here for an example - if you are using PHP 5.3+ there is a much simpler solution.

Since PHP 5.3 the spl_autoload_register has had a prepend option which places the autoloader at the top of the stack. This means that it will try your autoloader first, rather than the Varien one, avoiding the warning if the file can only be found using your autoloader. To do this just use the following command

spl_autoload_register('my_autoloader',null,true);