I've taken over an old merchello site (v 1.7 i think). The problem is that the documentation only covers from 1.13.1 on their site and I can't upgrade it at the moment.

The problem is that when some of the merchello customers was deleted some time ago, the members was not. So now when a member signs in (we are just checking member) and the code tries to get the address for the merchello customer we get an error.

What I want to do is to do a fix for this, and when the user logs in I check if the merchello customer entity exist and if not, creates one. I'm guessing this is done somewhere but I can't seem to find it.

When we create a new member we do this

        var user = this.memberService.CreateWithIdentity(email, email, password, MemberTypes.Customer);

        this.memberService.SavePassword(user, password);
        var customer = this.merchelloContext.Services.CustomerService.GetByLoginName(email);
        var region = new RegionInfo(this.requestLanguage.Culture.LCID);
        var destination = new Address() {
            Name = email,
            Address1 = string.Empty,
            Address2 = string.Empty,
            Locality = string.Empty,
            Region = string.Empty,
            PostalCode = string.Empty,
            CountryCode = region.Name,
        };
        customer.CreateCustomerAddress(destination, "defaultBilling", AddressType.Billing);
        this.merchelloContext.Services.CustomerService.Save(customer);

And I figure that the merchello customer is created when the member is (?)

How should I check if the merchello customer exists (best practice) and how do I create it if it's missing?