Coda recognising who is using the system

Guns and Gunettes

For some time now, I’ve been looking for some way of when a client logs into my website, only their details show…not on a separate page just for them, on one page that will recognise the email address they logged in with and will fetch the appropriate Data from somewhere, including financials etc…without having to get my head around how WP API works or anything like that. Since Coda, I have put all this data into Documents and have got some embedded on my website now. In essence, I can’t be bothered with WP and am using Coda as my reporting webpages.

Now I can get to the point:

How do I get Coda to recognise who is hitting the page and respond accordingly with the clients info?

JA.

Hi @Investor_HQ

You can share your doc with those of your clients who have a Google account, and you can apply filters to the data using the User() function (which references the profile of the currently logged in user), so that a user will only see a particular row if they are tagged in a particular column in that row, e.g. create a “People” column where you specify who is allowed to see the relevant row, and then set the filter condition to something like People.Contains(User()).

This will work so long as you do not give your clients edit rights to the doc; if they have edit rights, then they can change the filter condition and see all the data, including from your other clients. Also, it won’t work if you share the doc via link-sharing, rather than naming specific users - the User() function only works with logged in users.

Anyway, personally, I would be cautious about exposing data this way, when the only thing standing between one client and another client’s data is a single filter condition. There’s always a risk of some mistake or malfunction in the filter condition exposing data to the wrong client. You might be better off waiting for Coda to implement the cross-doc feature and in-doc permissions, which in theory would allow you to run one doc as a central database, and use a separate doc for each client that pulls data from the central database, but with a few more “fail-safe” layers of protection to reduce the risk of the wrong data being exposed.

Either way, it’s always a good idea to set up an extra ‘test account’ that sees what your clients see (rather than what you see as the owner of the doc), so that you can test everything thoroughly.

Those are my thoughts anyway - more than happy to be corrected by others who know their way around Coda better than I do! :slight_smile:

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No Tim…that’s the best answer I’ve had in the 10 months or so trying to learn a solution…I can’t even pick a spelling or grammtical error in your msg…and thanks for addressing the security issue also as I would never have thought of that and given the profiles of some of the people I deal with, that’s not an option.

I’m going to go for your Option B using API to “Cross Doc”…unfortunately, I’m not the waiting type…(I’m also a “Last minute” person so you can imagine how well that combination goes together!). So on my webpage, do I just put all the client “Docs” on top of each other as they will only be able to see the one I have shared with them?

No trouble at all. Not sure I follow the final sentence in your post above. If you mean you will be embedding your Coda docs in your website, as far as I know the Coda Embed function only works via link-sharing, which would mean the users would not be authenticated. If you do find something that works for you, I’d be interested to see the results.

Best of luck!

It actually embeds the whole Doc and I can’yt work out how to only embed a section or report.

Will keep you posted.

Thanks again

JA.