What does the Customer is_active flag do?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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)_/¯