Creating a new entity with existing entity type

Question

I am fairly new with Magento and not sure if answer to this is very trivial, but looking at available help through search. I was not able to figure out the right way.

For a solution, I am building with Magento I want to add a address for a new entity, which i have created (say Store entity - Multistore setup). My initial thought was to user existing address entity created by Magento base but then realized that it's more specific to customer entity (table name: customer_address_entity). So I decided to create a new entity with name store_address_entity.

However, the store_address_entity attributes are very similar to customer_address_entity and there is no point of repeating the attributes and was wondering, If there is any better way to do this. I mean

• Can I create store_address_entity with customer_address_entity type?

• Or Use same attribute set for shop_address_entity as for customer_address_entity?

Answer 1

1. You can create a store_address_entity, including all the other tables _varchar, _int, etc. And then copy (create) all the attributes as for customer_address_entity

2. you can't use the same attributeset for the entity, because attribute sets are nailed to one entity_type.

But if you know the attributes and they don't change, you should think about a flat table.

• Lalit: If we need to create a separate entity then i see a redundancy here. I thought there will be a better way to do this. Do you also think same?
• Fabian Blechschmidt: Yes it is somehow a redundency, but that's the way to do it in magento :)
• Lalit: Also, I can see one column in customer_address_entity table, which says 'attribute_set_id'. Can't we create similar table for store_address_entity and specify this as 2? which is attribute set id for customer_address_entity attributes. To avoid duplication of attributes.
• Fabian Blechschmidt: Ok let me be clear here: YES you can. You can do everything we are talking about a turing-complete programming language. But you get a whole world of work, because there are dependencies no one of us is aware of. And you don't want to hack foreign key dependencies in a database :-). Clone all the attributes.
• Fabian Blechschmidt: Or don't do it, go down the dark path. I'm sure we can both learn a lot, please report about it :-)