Add "Not Specified" as a gender option when customer does not specify gender

[chadbean]

When creating a new customer in the Magento 2 admin, the gender field has only two options: Male or Female. This is not ideal as many times a customer won't specify their gender and there won't be any way to infer it. I propose adding a new option of 'Not Specified' for these cases.

[chadbean]

Or, perhaps instead of setting a value for "Not Specified", the select box just has no value or a disabled value for "Not Specified" which is NULL.

[vpelipenko]

@chadbean, these changes make sense and it is approved by product owner. But I think that it will change expected behavior a bit. 'Male' option has value '1' now and 'Female' is '2', but you want to change it and add 'Not Specified' with value 1. Probably it will confuse some extension developers. I suggest to add new option at the and of the list (with value '3'). What do you think?

[chadbean]

I added "Not Specified" as value '1', assuming it would be a default value. I'm okay with making it a value of '3'. What about instead, we just update the front-end so it renders the drop-down with a "Not Specified" label that's disabled and shows first? Then, if the form gets saved without a value selected, the value should be NULL in the DB. Thoughts?

[ilol]

@chadbean we need to save backward compatibility with previous versions and can`t change codes of enumerators. Please take into account migration difficulties (although our Data Migration Tool is able to do this).

But you could always change sequence of drop-down items on UI.
Think, NULL has other meaning: really undefined value, "not specified" could have additional meaning like "third gender"

[vpelipenko]

@chadbean, thank you last changes, but integration tests are failed after that. Looks like that you also should make changes in app/code/Magento/Customer/Setup/CustomerSetup.php. Are you going to fix it? After that we can accept this PR.

[chadbean]

Thanks, I have made the change. For some reason, locally I am unable to see the additional option on the admin select combo. Is there a certain cache I should be clearing?

[vpelipenko]

Hm, probably you need to reinstall Magento and new option will be added by CustomerSetup.php script.