Case Sensitivity w/ Email Lookups

Hi All,

I brought this up in an unrelated thread and am switching to a new topic for clarity and proper Discourse habits (and more input! 🕵🏻‍♀️)

I have an email column marked as row owner in my Glide-owned User Data sheet. This is the email address the user logged in with. Also in the User Data sheet I have an email relation column which connects the User Data sheet to a Member Directory sheet where members have input their own email address, sometimes using mixed case.

I then have a look-up column in the User Data sheet which specifically looks up the email address that the member input into the Member Directory sheet. All of this is so the app knows when a logged in user is a directory member or not. (My users consist of directory members as well as outsiders, so lots of visibility settings happening)

I discovered an issue as soon as I shared the app with a few test users where Glide does not match mixed case email addresses in the lookup column - meaning a member who used a capital “D” in her address was not being recognized as a member. I did some research on the forums and it seems that Glide’s relations are case-sensitive?

I “fixed” my issue by creating a hidden column in my Member Directory sheet with a formula that converts all emails to lowercase. I then changed my Glide sheet to reference that column instead.

My question is - was this the right solution? Is there a better solution? I’ve noticed since this fix that my app is slower to load, though this could be the result of other concurrent changes :thinking:

Also - is Glide’s case sensitivity here expected behavior? Or would it be considered a bug? I am guessing that columns specifically marked as “email address” are not case-sensitive, but there is no way to mark a look-up column as containing an email address - correct?

(I don’t want to ask my users to modify their behavior when inputting their emails into the shared Google sheet)

Appreciate any thoughts here, thanks always!
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Prior bit of discussion on this topic here if interested (it’s @ the end of an unrelated thread :grimacing:):

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Hi @a.manda

I remember this topic being discussed before.

If it helps :arrow_down:

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This is super helpful! (And somehow I missed it in my research, thank you)

Looks like this IS the current solution then, and hopefully it’s not the cause of my sudden slow-load. Would be cool if Glide added a “Case sensitive?” checkbox to their Lookup columns!

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I experienced the same with user emails and case sensitivity, agree it’d be useful to have a native way to handle this use case.

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I have had to have sheets just force everything with a email to lower case

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