What happened: The user overview at admin/people shows some users with empty fields, although they are required during registration. Also, the affected users fail to load the fields by using user_load(). I was afraid something very bad happened, but the data was present in the field_data tables. It turned out that the permanent field cache table did not contain the all the data of the affected users: the fields were missing.
In my case, there are fields attached to users and a callback uses user_load(). If the cache is cleared and the users are loaded for the first time by the js callback it will be loaded incompletely. The callback has a dependency on the field module, but that's not sufficient to load all data (there is no error thrown). As a result, an incomplete user object is permanently cached by Drupal.

The readme file suggest to add dependencies and includes until all errors are resolved. However, this is not sufficient if fields are used.
In that case, the field_sql_storage and the field type modules (e.g. text) need to be added as a dependency. I suspect that all fieldable entities are affected, since the user is one as well.

I suggest to add this information to the readme file.

Comments

markhalliwell’s picture

Status: Needs review » Closed (outdated)