[spree-user] spree.user.signup event behavior

This change is indeed deliberate, in a way. It probably used to exist
within spree_auth_devise and then was moved to CheckoutController for
reasons that I don't know of.

Is there somewhere else in particular that you'd prefer this event to be
triggered?

Yes, which is why I described the behavior as surprising.

My assumption (and I think the assumption of most developers/users) would
be that a spree.user.signup event would fire when the user signs up - that
is, upon creation of the user's account. As I described in my original
post, that doesn't happen.

Let me give you a hypothetical where this leads to what I consider
counter-intuitive behavior, using spree_store_credits as an example.

1. I advertise in my store that a user will receive $10 in store credit
upon signing up, and I implement this by creating store credits on the
spree.user.signup event
2. A new user comes to my store, and signs up
3. This user goes to their account page, which shows their store credit.
  At this time it will be $0, because they have not entered the checkout
flow.

If I were a customer of this site, I would think that I didn't get the
credit that was promised - either because something is broken, or because
the store owner is making a fraudulent promise. Not good.

Now we can continue this scenario in a couple of ways. The first is the
'success' case:

4. The user adds an item to cart
5. The user starts the checkout process
6. When the user gets to the payment page they see that the credits are
available and can be applied to their purchase

So in this scenario, the messaging was off but the desired functionality
still worked. Not ideal, but you can argue that it's acceptable. After
all the customer got what they were expecting. And very possibly they'd
never visit the account page before checking out, so step #3 never comes
into play.

But now consider a variation on this theme:

4'. The user is interrupted, and needs to leave before completing a
purchase or even adding an item to cart
5'. The user comes back to the site from a different computer, or some time
after their session expires
6'. After logging in, the user's store credits still don't appear in their
account
7'. The user adds an item to cart
8'. The user starts the checkout process
9'. When the user gets to the payment page, there are no credits granted.
  The user never receives their $10 store credit

The reason is pretty simple. The signup event is fired in this block:

           if session[:spree_user_signup] && @order
             fire_event('spree.user.signup', user: try_spree_current_user,
order: @order)
             session[:spree_user_signup] = nil
           end

Since session[:spree_user_signup] isn't true at this point (the user signed
up in another session), this block in Spree::CheckoutController never
executes.

In my view this is strange behavior, both from the perspective of a store
owner and developer (I'd expect this event to be fired on signup) and from
the perspective of a customer of the store.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

--Peter

I have absolutely no idea how we could go about fixing this problem. Sign
up is handled by the authentication extension, and so we have no other way
of notifying Spree itself that a sign up event has taken place OTHER than
setting a session variable.

If you can think of a better way to do this, please submit a patch.