1.7.6 regression? user.Email in forms for logged in users no longer works

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1

Hello,

I collect submission from my students using a form. I’ve set GRIST_FORCE_LOGIN: true so that they are always logged in. Using 1.7.4, I’m able to user user.Email in formulas to capture which logged in user submitted the form. When upgrading to 1.7.6 (and also 1.7.8), user.Email always indicates anon@getgrist.com. Rolling back to 1.7.4 fixes the issue.

I didn’t see anything in the release notes about form processing changing and I couldn’t find any other users bringing up this issue.

Is this an intentional behavior change or an unintentional regression?

Thank you!

PS: I use SAML authentication, the authentication hasn’t changed. Here’s the logs showing that the email field is provided:

info: ActiveDoc applyUserActions done startTs=1764677745851, start=2025-12-02T12:15:45.851Z, org=docs, email=redacted@redacted.edu, userId=6, altSessionId=p8KrBArFSk3Hy4QT1xacrE, age=207, access=editors, docId=225dMjdjbg95av9LvBWxW4, mark_waitForInit=1, actionDesc=[['BulkAddRecord', 'Submissions', [null], {Assignment: [10], Student_Notes: ['This is a note'], Submission: ['[]']}]], mark_accessRulesPreCheck=0, mark_dataEngine=3, mark_accessRulesCheck=4, actionNum=10001, linkId=0, otherId=0, numDocActions=11, numRows=11, numBytes=1563, mark_docStorageTxn=4, mark_docStorage=5, mark_processBundle=5, docRowCount=5275, mark_updateRowCount=5, mark_accessRulesApplied=5, mark_sendDocUpdate=7, mark_notifySubscribers=7, mark_accessRulesFinish=7, resultDesc={actionNum: 10001, actionHash: 'fa559433e8a7e05f67a08a88bfb43fd4bafda3d5639083fa9d5180bb43815c8f', retValues: [[1285]], isModification: true}, mark_end=7
1 Like
2

Hi @Justin2.

I think this got missed in release notes (I don’t see it either). I’ll update them shortly. Sorry for the mix-up.

The short answer is yes, this was an intentional change. Form submissions were inconsistent before in that they considered the sign-in status of the user (so fields like name and email could be populated via trigger formulas, as you’ve been doing), but there was no indication of this to the user who submitted the form. This ended up being a poor default behavior since it could lead to a user unknowingly sharing more information about themselves than they intended. The behavior now is that regardless of your sign-in status, all submissions appear as if they were made anonymously.

We would like to revisit this at some point and make it possible to configure forms to allow form submissions to include information about the Grist user who submitted the form. There’s some additional work that needs to be done before we can do that (new configuration in creator panel for form widget, account switcher on form page to let submitter see/change the active account, etc.)

George

3

I agree with @Justin2, this has been tremendously impacting my work and I look forward a fix soon. Thanks to the Grist team!!