AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I have been working on using ProductTemplate fields (7.02). I added Merchant Text fields and Customer Text fields, these are hidden but used in some calculations and passed around with products added to basket. When I add new product and assign a template the Merchant field associations are created in the ac_ProductTemplateFields table as expected. I can then access these in my controls to make calculations.

My problem is that unlike the merchant fields the customer fields are not associated as I would have expected. So when I try and search for the fields to push in my data the fields are never found. If I manually add the associations the code works fine. My question is am I missing something or should theses field be associated when I add products?

Any pointers would be appreciated, thanks

Merchant field do differ from customer fields. A merchant can define specific set of values for merchant fields then those values are available to be shown to all customers. But customer fields are filled by customers when purchasing products having different values for different customers. There values been stored for order instead of product.