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During a discussion today I was informed that the Customer is_active flag doesn't actually do anything.

This is a unique flag, like the customer email address, in that it's not an EAV attribute. Instead, it is a column in the customer_entity table.

I tried setting the flag to 0 for a test customer, but am still able to login. All other functionality seems to work normally.

Is this flag provided as a convenience to developers? Is it intended for some future purpose? What, if anything, does is_active do?


Edit: Here's a related stack overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3617832/disable-customer-in-magento

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    I think it is from EE. There customer can be actived/deactivated as far as I remember
    – Fabian Blechschmidt
    Feb 28, 2013 at 23:30
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    I have access to EE, but don't see that functionality anywhere. Deleting them removes the row completely.
    – Ryre
    Feb 28, 2013 at 23:32
  • short grep over the EE-lite doesn't show anything. You are right. Then I would interpret it as stub for the functionality :-)
    – Fabian Blechschmidt
    Mar 1, 2013 at 0:10
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    Same here as Toast mentioned: Don't see the functionality in EE Backend.
    – Anna Völkl
    Mar 1, 2013 at 13:33
  • Ok can someone please post an answer? Toast, I think you did it, so answer your question and earn 25 rep :-)
    – Fabian Blechschmidt
    Mar 2, 2013 at 0:29

2 Answers 2

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This is a legacy field, derived from Mage_Eav and present as far back as v0.7.14800 (and perhaps earlier). As such, it by far predates the earliest version of EE.

Whether the value of this field is used or not is a matter of implementation (such as it is for the catalog_category entity). I base this assertion on the fact that the Mage_Eav module does not provide any use of it as a base behavior for EAV entities.

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  • in your opinion, is it safe to use this flag? I'm working on a manual customer approval process that this seems designed for, but I'm hesitant to use if it isn't supported.
    – Ryre
    Mar 4, 2013 at 15:43
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    "support" in this case is what you build. I would not use this flag, as it may be used down the road. It would be better to add a namespaced attribute (eg. toast_is_active) to make use of.
    – benmarks
    Mar 4, 2013 at 17:11
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    Hi Ben @benmarks , in Magento 2 this legacy field in the customer_entity table continues to exist.
    – WaPoNe
    Mar 12, 2019 at 10:55
  • why is it so filled with these plots ...
    – medmek
    Feb 2, 2020 at 23:23
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Coming back to this many years later, it just occurred to me that the is_active flag is probably present in any [EAV]_entity table because, at one time before the earliest releases, all entities were in a single entity table. When EAV entities were broken out into their own tables, this column went with them.

Best guess! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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