[Solved] How can I determine what group a customer is in?

[Aaron Karp]

I need to be able to determine what group a customer is in in order to display help text as needed. Specifically, I want users in the "Wholesale" group to see something like "Wholesale prices require a minimum purchase of 10 items" on the product page. There are other group-sensitive bits of information I'd like to show for other groups, so if anyone could tell me a good way to determine the current user's group, I'd really appreciate it.

[Aaron Karp]

Once again, after searching for quite some time prior to posting this thread, right after I post it I find what I was looking for in the first place. Those looking to make this work, take a look at http://www.prestashop.com/forums/viewthread/74259/general_discussion/solvedhow_to_show_customer_group_name_automatically_at_front_office

To make it work, I created a new file, specifically /override/classes/FrontController.php, and duplicated the entire init() function from FrontControllerCore.php in it. Within the new override version of the init code, I added rocky's code from the thread linked above after $cookie = new Cookie('ps'); and that enabled me to use {$groupName} in all of my .tpl files.

NOTE: In rocky's code, he assigns the group's name to 'groupName', but another poster in the original thread indicated that that variable name may be in use elsewhere. To play it safe, I changed

$smarty->assign('groupName', $group->name[intval($cookie->id_lang)]);

to

$smarty->assign('custGroupName', $group->name[intval($cookie->id_lang)]);

and use {$custGroupName} wherever I need it in my templates. It may work fine using just $groupName, but I erred on the side of caution.

Thanks to rocky for this and all of his other great work helping others develop in PrestaShop!