Magento - customer_save_after always fired twice - php

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);
}

Answer 4

I used a static var:
private static $_handleCustomerFirstSearchCounter = 1;
public function Savest($observer) {
if (self::$_handleCustomerFirstSearchCounter > 1) {
return $this;
}
$customerData = Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomer();
$model = Mage::getModel('customerst/customerst')
->setQueryText(Mage::app()->getRequest()->getParam('q'))
->setCustomerId($customerData->getId())
->setCustomerName($customerData->getName())
->save();
self::$_handleCustomerFirstSearchCounter++;
}

Answer 5

The difference between these 2 events is one of them can't get customer info, while the other can. So the solution is
public function email_CustomerRegister(Varien_Event_Observer $observer){
$customer = Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomer();
$customer_email = $customer->getEmail();
if(empty($customer_email)){
return;
}
// do something
}