Magento - customer_save_after always fired twice

Question

I am using the customer_save_after event in magento, and all is working fine apart from 1 annoying thing - it is always fired twice.

There are no other modules rewriting this and I can find no other reason for this happening. When I look through all of the events getting fired at this time and this event is definately getting fired twice.

Anyone explain this?

I am writing a web service that hooks into this and its turning out to be quite inefficient to duplicate things.

Answer 1

I've noticed this double-save behaviour too. The way to prevent issue with your observer is to set a flag in the request that can be checked e.g.

    if(Mage::registry('customer_save_observer_executed')){
        return $this; //this method has already been executed once in this request (see comment below)
    }

    ...execute arbitrary code here....

    /* Customer Addresses seem to call the before_save event twice, 
    * so we need to set a variable so we only process it once, otherwise we get duplicates
    */
    Mage::register('customer_save_observer_executed',true); 

Answer 2

I ran into this as well and did a stack trace in the observer for each method, and can tell you at least ONE reason why it fires twice (there may be others):

When a new user creates an account, createPostAction() runs when the form is submitted. This action does a save() on the customer.

THEN, after the customer has been created, setCustomerAsLoggedIn() is called by createPostAction(). This in turn calls setCustomer(), which has this little bit of code:

 if ((!$customer->isConfirmationRequired()) && $customer->getConfirmation()) {
    $customer->setConfirmation(null)->save(); // here is the second save
    $customer->setIsJustConfirmed(true);
 }

Those are the two save()s which dispatch the save event. I only know this for sure for account creation in Magento 1.5. I doubt if it gets fired twice when creating users in the Admin area, or when a user edit's their information... but I don't know for sure.

I hope this helps!

Answer 3

Be careful with Jonathans solution, 'customer_save_observer_executed' stays in the session, so event will not be fired again in the browser session. So it's generally a bad idea, because it will not allow to register two or more customers in a row(actually, it will, but events will not be fired)

I suggest the following solution:

public function customerRegister(Varien_Event_Observer $observer)
{       
    $customer = $observer->getEvent()->getCustomer();          
    if (!$customer->getId())
        return $this;                

    if(Mage::registry('customer_save_observer_executed_'.$customer->getId()))
        return $this;  

    //your code goes here

    Mage::register('customer_save_observer_executed_'.$customer->getId(),true); 
}