Disable autoloader from trying to load JsonSerializable

Question

I have the following setup in a library within CodeIgniter:

class DataModelAutoloader
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        spl_autoload_register(array($this, 'loader'));
        log_message('debug', 'QR-Invited autoloader initialized');
    }

    public function loader($className)
    {
        log_message("debug", "Accessing loader for class: " . $className);
        if (substr($className, 0, 9) == 'datamodel') {
            $fullyQualifiedPath = APPPATH.str_replace('\\', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $className).'.php';
            log_message('debug', 'Fully qualified path is: ' . $fullyQualifiedPath);
            require APPPATH.str_replace('\\', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $className).'.php';
        }
    }
}

Now, one of my data models, Invite, in datamodel/Invite.php is getting loaded, but it's defined as:

class Invite implements JsonSerializable {
  ...
};

The problem is that it is now trying to load datamodel/JsonSerializable.php, which, of course, doesn't exist, because I want to use the built-in PHP 5.4.0 JsonSerializable. (I have PHP 5.5.X installed on the box I'm running on). So, I'm getting the following exception when I run this code:

<p>Severity: Warning</p>
<p>Message:  require(qrinvited-application/datamodel/JsonSerializable.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory</p>
<p>Filename: libraries/Datamodelautoloader.php</p>
<p>Line Number: 20</p>

Is there a way to disable attempted autoloading for things like this that should be built-in to PHP5? Or, perhaps I'm doing something wrong in how I'm extending the class?

Answer 1

If its all about 'namespaces' use implements \JsonSerializable. The \ makes it so that PHP knows to use the default namespace instead of the namespace the class currently resides within (in this case, datamodel).