Get the current customer role in Magento

Looking at the old articles on our website that long for a rewrite, I sometimes stumble upon a gem that can be useful. One of those is the piece of code enables us to do custom stuff if our customer is assigned to a certain customer group.

You can find customer groups in Magento Administration.

• Customers->Customer Groups is where customer groups are managed.
• Customers->Manage Customers->Click on a customer->Account Information tab->Customer group dropdown is where you would assign a customer to a group.

The way I see it, the possible implementation of this code would be using it in an observer to add custom javascript to our page’s head if a customer is assigned to the ‘Wholesale‘ group.

Let’s do that.

Begin by registering your module. I presume you’ll know how to do this, or have your existing module you can use.

Now, create a configuration file for your module. Since my example module is called ‘Customergroup‘ with namespace ‘Inchoo‘, the code below goes in

app/code/community/Inchoo/Customergroup/etc/config.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
    <modules>
        <Inchoo_Customergroup>
            <version>1.0.0</version>
        </Inchoo_Customergroup>
    </modules>
    <global>
        <events>
            <controller_action_layout_generate_blocks_after>
                <observers>
                    <inchoo_customergroup>
                        <type>singleton</type>
                        <class>Inchoo_Customergroup_Model_Observer</class>
                        <method>placeCustomJs</method>
                    </inchoo_customergroup>
                </observers>
            </controller_action_layout_generate_blocks_after>
        </events>
    </global>
</config>

Now, we’ll create our observer.
app/code/community/Inchoo/Customergroup/Model/Observer.php

<?php
class Inchoo_Customergroup_Model_Observer
{
    public function placeCustomJs()
    {
 
        $roleId = Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->getCustomerGroupId();
        $role = Mage::getSingleton('customer/group')->load($roleId)->getData('customer_group_code');
        $role = strtolower($role);
 
        $headBlock = Mage::app()->getLayout()->getBlock('head');
        if($headBlock && $role=='wholesale')
        {
            $headBlock->addJs('test/myScript.js');
        }
        return $this;
    }
}

This isn’t the only use case. You can, of course, use this anywhere else you see fit. For example showing a message for certain customers, a different newsletter box, etc.

Just keep in mind that $role will equal ‘not logged in‘ if a customer isn’t logged in.

Note: This is a revamp of an article originally written in March 2009.