05_Working-with-Customers.md

Working with Customers

As already described in the installation chapter, customers are simple data objects that need to implement certain interfaces or extend certain abstract classes.

As a result, working with customers is pretty much like working with Pimcore data objects. But there are three aspects to consider:

• It is recommended to use Customer as class name. If another name should be used, this has to be configured. For details see Configuration chapter.

• CustomerProviderInterface: An implementation of the CustomerProviderInterface is registered as service CustomerManagementFrameworkBundle\CustomerProvider\CustomerProviderInterface and provides an abstraction for CRUD operations on customer data objects. This is especially handy since it considers the configured class name for the customer class.

• CustomerSaveManager is responsible for all actions/hooks which are executed when a customer object is saved and can be configured in configuration. Its main components are

  • Customer Save Handlers
  • Automatic Object Naming Scheme
  • Customer Save Validator
  • Save Customer with Disabled Hooks

  For Details see Customer Save Manager Chapter of the docs.

Other than that - just use the customer object like every other data object in Pimcore.

In addition to customers, there are two additional data entities provided by the CMF

• Customer Activities: For storing all kind of activities of customers like registering for newsletters, placing orders, etc.
• Customer Segments: For segmenting customers and grouping them together by interests or behavior.