Notice: Trying to get property of non-object

Question

Huge error as soon as I try to view any page on my magento site now displays:

Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in /httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Config.php on line 1227 app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Config.php on line 1239 Fatal error: Call to a member function getIdFieldName() on a non-object in /app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Abstract.php on line 151

If anyone knows what is causing this you will be saving my life.

Answer 1

I had this same problem while installing an instance of Magento within our testing environment. Because I downloaded Magento Enterprise on my local machine and pushed the code to the test environment using GIT, my .gitignore file left out the enterprise.xml and config.xml. Because these files were missing it generated the error message described by the OP. Once in place, it sent me to the Magento Install page! Hope that helps someone out there.

Answer 2

Set a breakpoint in there to see exactly which XML node it's choking on. My guess is that you may have broken the config with some bad XML in a custom module.

The place it's choking is:

public function getGroupedClassName($groupType, $classId, $groupRootNode=null)
{
    ...
    $config = $this->_xml->global->{$groupType.'s'}->{$group};

Answer 3

This notice happened to me when an unfulfilled module-dependency caused an exception.

The exception-handler then looked for the helper core/data to translate the exception-message whose config.xml was not loaded in this early stage. So the xml-node config/global/helpers was missing at all.

Solution: Try to have a look up higher in the stack to find probably missed module-dependencies.

Answer 4

Looks like magento cannot read files in app/etc folder

it needs to read app/etc/config.xml and app/etc/local.xml

In linux try following to fix permission

find app/etc -type f -exec chmod 666 {} \;
find app/etc -type d -exec chmod 777 {} \;

Answer 5

This has happened to me once when I forgot to run "composer install" so this came down to module dependencies that were not met.