POST /api/customers and POST /api/visitors/{id}/merge. They ship together
because the first creates the need for the second: a customer typed in at
a counter has no face template, so when a camera sees that person later
the matcher has nothing to compare against and enrols them as somebody
new. That is the design working, not failing - and it means every
hand-created customer is a duplicate waiting to happen. Shipping the
create alone would manufacture duplicates into the state CLAUDE.md
already flags: "there is no merge endpoint server-side, so its
duplicates would be unrecoverable."
The number comes from clients.visitor_seq, taken exactly as RecordVisit
takes it. Two sources of visitor numbers that could disagree would be
worse than none: V-42 has to mean one person whichever way they arrived.
The label is the typed name, or "Visitor N" when they gave none - the
same string the engine writes, so a record created by hand is
indistinguishable from an enrolled one afterwards.
The merge is one transaction over FIVE tables, and the count is the
point. visits, purchases, visitor_embeddings, consents and
visitor_profiles all reference visitors ON DELETE CASCADE, so a table
this forgets to re-point is not an error - those rows are destroyed with
the source and nobody finds out until a customer's history is short.
visitor_profiles is UNIQUE on visitor_id, so the two cannot simply both
move and something has to win. Blanks on the survivor are filled from the
source and nothing it already holds is overwritten, which is exactly
right for the case this exists for: a hand-typed name and phone joining
the face that was recognised a week later.
Policies carried over from the edge gallery's merge, which had to settle
all of this once already: a human-assigned name outranks an auto
"Visitor N" whichever direction the operator merged; visit_count is
recomputed with COUNT(*) and never summed, because the stored counter may
be stale and the row count cannot be; first_seen_at takes the earlier of
the two, since it is one person and always was.
Two things that are this side's own:
- The source is deleted for real, not soft-deleted. A tombstone would
leave its number resolving to a record holding nothing, which reads as
"this customer exists and has never been here" - a worse answer than
"no such customer".
- The response names the RETIRED reference. Staff write V-42 on cards and
read it aloud; a merge that does not say which one stopped working
leaves somebody to discover it at a counter.
Manager and above, not staff. Apart from erasure this is the only
irreversible operation on a customer: two people welded together cannot
be separated, because nothing records which visit came from whom. It logs
at WARNING and writes an audit row for the same reason.
Also fixed while here: two s.Log.Printf calls - one of them mine, from
the password endpoint - that would panic on a nil logger. The package has
a nil-guarded s.logf and those were the only two not using it. The
password one sat in an error path no test reaches, which is exactly where
that bug waits.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KGcjxF1cNLcuwc3DAPcnfj
Suriyakumarvijayanayagam
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