Weird error – “Notice: Trying to property…”

Relevanssi is doing the exact match bonus there, but when it tries to fetch a post object from the cache to check if the exact match bonus should be applied or not, it’s not getting a post object, but instead something else. That something else is not an object, and doesn’t have the post_title or post_object fields.

Disabling the exact match bonus should make this error go away, but of course doesn’t fix the root cause. What that is, is a bit of a mystery for me at the moment – the Relevanssi cache should only ever have post objects.

If you want to do a bit of digging, you can find the problematic lines in Relevanssi’s /lib/search.php file. They look like this:

if ( $exact_match_bonus ) {
	$post    = relevanssi_get_post( $match->doc );
	$clean_q = str_replace( array( '"', '”', '“' ), '', $q );
	if ( $clean_q ) {
		if ( stristr( $post->post_title, $clean_q ) !== false ) {
			$match->weight *= $exact_match_boost['title'];
		}
		if ( stristr( $post->post_content, $clean_q ) !== false ) {
			$match->weight *= $exact_match_boost['content'];
		}
	}
}

You can then add

var_dump( $post );

after the line

$post = relevanssi_get_post( $match->doc );

and then do a search. What does that print out?

Well, now it’s even more messed up. Can I undo it now? It’s FAR too big to post here. And it includes an entire other page before the search page.

Yes, it’s supposed to look messed up, and yes, undo it as soon as you’ve seen what it prints out, it’s just for debugging.

Instead of var_dump( $post );, what if you add this to the same spot:

if ( !is_object($post)) var_dump($post);

What does that print out? Probably much less stuff.

And… looks like the original problem. The line numbers changed, but nothing else.

It’s not the same as the original: it’s printing NULL there and that’s the problem. Instead of post objects, Relevanssi is seeing NULL, which causes the error. Of course it makes no sense to have NULL values at that point…

You can try replacing the /lib/common.php file with this file: https://github.com/msaari/relevanssi/blob/master/lib/common.php

Does that remove the error messages?

Nope – still has the same error, NULL included.

At this point I would just suggest disabling the exact match bonus.

Where do I find this setting?

Nevermind, I found it. Thank you! That solved the problem.