Customer Confirmation

This one’s a little un-intuitive. At first.

There are times where you’ll want to programmatically check if a customer is confirmed. To do this you’d instantiate a customer object like this

$customer = Mage::getModel('customer/customer')->getCollection()
->addFieldToFilter('entity_id','197')
->getFirstItem();

or like this

$customer = Mage::getModel('customer/customer')->load(197);
$customer = Mage::getModel('customer/customer')->loadByEmail('foo@example.com');

However, if you dump out the data of a confirmed customer,

var_dump($customer->getData());
var_dump($customer->getConfirmation());
var_dump($customer->getData('confirmation'));

you won’t see a confirmation value. Maybe it’s EAV, so you add all the attributes to the select

$customer = Mage::getModel('customer/customer')->getCollection()
->addFieldToFilter('entity_id','197')
->addAttributeToSelect('*')
->getFirstItem();

Still Nothing. You might spent a lot of time cursing EAV and listeners, wondering where-the-heck the confirmation value is stored, and how-the-heck you’re supposed to load it from a customer object.

However, if you load a customer that hasn’t been confirmed and dump out the object’s data, you’re going to see something like this

  'confirmation' => string '700df1' (length=6)

which is a hint to what’s really going on.

There is a confirmation attribute associate with each object, but (in retrospect) it should have been named confirmation_key. Magento uses the attribute to store the key value that’s passed into the system when a customer click the confirmation link in their email.

That means if there’s a value in confirmation, then the customer is not confirmed, meaning if confirmation is empty then the customer is confirmed. The reason you don’t see any value in there for a confirmed customer is Magento removes the value after a customer is confirmed, so there’s nothing for EAV to load.

A little counter intuitive, but once you understand the intent of the attribute (store the confirmation key), it makes a lot more sense.