In this episode, we tackle how to make sure guest users' orders are linked to their account once they register. We start off by assessing the state of the orders table: some orders have no user, just an email, while others are already attached to registered users. Our goal is to automatically associate any previous guest orders (by matching email) with the new user account upon registration.
You'll see step-by-step how to set up a Laravel event listener that catches when a user registers, and then attaches any matching orders to their user record. We explore how Laravel fires the Registered event and how to create our own custom listener (called AttachOrders) to hook into this process. And, we cover a little detour where our listener gets generated in the wrong namespace—it's a great little troubleshooting tip if you run into this yourself!
The episode walks through the exact code you'll need to pull matching orders and associate them. We use a pretty direct approach at first (looping through each order), but this gets the functionality working so you can see the results right away. By the end, you'll have user accounts that, once created, instantly show all relevant previous orders—even ones placed when checking out as a guest.
We also touch briefly on upcoming improvements, like verifying email addresses before associating orders, to help keep things secure. For now, it's about getting the core system working, and you'll see it in action by registering as a user and watching their guest orders magically appear in their account!