Magento 1.9 / OpenMage: Adding a static attribute to the customer table and forms that is a physical coumn in the customer_entity table

Question

After reading this thread that is sort of what we need to achieve (and does it with a custom attribute), it's not quite what I need and so I thought it would be good to ask the experts here.

We have a table, let's call it "customer_segment" with the following basic structure:

customer_segment_id
name

Then we've added a foreign key to the customer_entity table customer_segment_id that references the customer_segment_id in the customer_segment table.

Instead of hacking/overriding classes to get this field into the customer form, it seems logical that we can create a "static" attribute almost exactly like the customer group_id as it would also need to be attributed to orders, again just like group_id.

There are some hints in this post and the author appears to do a similar thing with the order entity.

Answer 1

If you have added the column like this:

$installer = $this;
$installer->startSetup();
$table = $installer->getTable('customer/entity');
$installer->getConnection()
 ->addColumn($table, 'segment_id', [
 'type' => Varien_Db_Ddl_Table::TYPE_INTEGER,
 'unsigned' => true,
 'nullable' => true,
 'comment' => 'Segment ID'
 ]);
$installer->getConnection()->addConstraint('FK_CUST_ENTITY_SEGMENT_ID',
 $table, 'segment_id',
 'customer_segment', 'customer_segment_id',
 'set null'
);
$installer->endSetup();

Then you can add the static attribute like this:

Mage::getModel('customer/attribute')->setData([
 'entity_type_id' => 1,
 'attribute_code' => 'segment_id',
 'backend_type' => 'static',
 'frontend_input' => 'text',
 'frontend_Label' => 'Segment ID',
 'is_user_defined' => 1,
 'is_visible' => 1,
 'used_in_forms' => ['adminhtml_customer', 'customer_account_edit', 'customer_account_create', 'checkout_register'] // Remove what you do not need
])
->save();