Magento associate customer with order after an placed order

Question

My custom module observes the sales_order_place_after event, and creates a customer and associates the customer with the order by setting customerId for the order.

What works?

• Order is placed
• Customer is created
• The customerId is updated in the order database

What doesn't work?

• The customerId is instantly set back to NULL by another script

How can I find out what script updates the customerId to NULL again, after my observer is done running?

Answer 1

I had the same problem - my assumption was that calling the save method on the order triggered whatever was listening to the sales_order_save_before/after events, one of which was setting the customer ID back to null. I worked around this by saving only the attributes I wanted, rather than triggering a save on the entire order:

$order
    ->setCustomerId($customer->getId())
    ->setCustomerIsGuest(0)
    ->setCustomerGroupId($customer->getGroupId());

$order->getResource()
    ->saveAttribute($order, 'customer_id'      )
    ->saveAttribute($order, 'customer_is_guest')
    ->saveAttribute($order, 'customer_group_id');

This allowed me to successfully associate a customer with the order in Magento EE 1.14.3.10 using the sales_model_service_quote_submit_success event.