How to identify user with email address

[user4]

Hello,

I understand I can identify email address of a specific Coda user but is it possible to do it the other way around?

Thanks!

[Scott_Collier-Weir]

Can you explain more along with your specific use case?

[Sathya_Thunger]

If by ‘the other way around’ you referred to user’s name, I don’t think you can do that.
The ‘user’ in Coda only holds 1 property, which is the email. The email is the user. There’s no other property held by Coda ‘user’.

If you want to be able to pull out a specific user’s email from for example a name, you can create your own user table first that at least holds another property which is the ‘name’.
For example a table with 2 columns: people, and name.

You can then refer the user using the name as assigned to their email in your table.

[Paul_Danyliuk]

It is legally possible with a pack but only through a sync table. The arguments will accept a list of emails and return you the list of people for those emails, no work required really (packs sdk automatically converts emails to people when you return values of ValueHintType.Person.

There’s a less legal way to directly read from the hidden table of Global Document People.

$$[grid:Global-Document-People:::false:false:].Filter(
  Email = "actinate@gmail.com"
).First()

Whether it will get your doc blocked or not is the question.

Generally it’s a good idea to track people yourself through a dedicated table. Eventually you’ll need to add properties to these people (e.g. teams, tags, salary etc) and you cannot do that on the internal table of people.

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@Sathya_Thunger

The ‘user’ in Coda only holds 1 property, which is the email. The email is the user. There’s no other property held by Coda ‘user’.

Not right. The user object holds an email, a full name, and a profile photo. Also the usual system properties like user ID, and IIRC also a property that shows their access rights to the doc but it’s hidden.

[Sathya_Thunger]

Oh sorry let me clarify. What I meant by ‘only holds 1 property’ is that the query-able data for People data type (under normal circumstances as Coda intended to be) only consist of the email. And cannot be looked up using names or other meta data.

When a user signed up using coda’s login or SSO, it is true that Coda table holds several other meta data regarding the account. But for people new in Coda and just using vanilla coda features without pack or special secret/hidden formulas, the only query-able data for People is the email. Unless there’s another table dedicated to list the users along with their other properties.