Customer Additional Information / customer_field

[Kiat Siong Ng]

Inconsistent displayed value of custom fields between backend and frontend.

Replication Steps

1. I created a custom field of type dropdown with 4 options: A, B, C, D in admin > CUSTOMERS > Customer Fields; selected Yes for Show on frontend and Use in account edit
2. Still in admin, I added the field in a customer's Additional Info, select option D and saved
3. Now, in frontend, I logged in as the customer and navigate to Account Info > Edit Account Information, the selected option displayed was A (note that there is no empty option in the dropdown for empty value), I expected selected option to be D
4. On the same page, I selected option C and save
5. Back in admin, the option value remained to be D, the value C saved in frontend was not reflected

[Boris Gurvich]

Thank you, I'll make sure it works in admin-spa :)

[Kiat Siong Ng]

It seems to me that the column data_serialized is redundant in table fcom_customer. I like fcom_customer_field and related tables for these reasons:

1. the data (as is) are ready for extraction by BI analytic such as Sisense
2. easier to transform the data for machine learning (ML is the next electricity, we need them data)
3. possible to perform mysql operations

Serialized data is very good for quick fix (storing inputs and spit out for display on a screen) and I used them, but later due to reason 1 I needed to go back and unpack the fields and made new tables. Lesson: should have done it right the first time. For the above reasons, serialized data should be avoided.

[Boris Gurvich]

data_serialized should be used only for data that doesn't need to be relational. That should be already working this way with products custom fields. If that's not the case with the Customers, it's because old experiments, and will be fixed.

[Boris Gurvich]

Btw, please feel free to suggest or ask questions on our community boards: https://www.sellvana.com/community/

[Boris Gurvich]

I see now that you've submitted a question there, didn't get notification!