This article ties in with a few other Frontly articles relating to User Management.
We encourage you to carefully consider and review the options in each of these settings before finalizing your set-up.
User Roles, Groups & Permissions
Custom User Fields
Edit Profile
Frontly stores your basic user data like email and password in a secure internal database so that you don't need to store that in a sheet.
However, if your use-case requires storing user data in a spreadsheet in addition to Frontly's internal storage, go over the 'Users Spreadsheet' tab to import a Sheet that will automatically link the active user to corresponding row in the spreadsheet.
You can locate this setting from homepage by clicking Users.
Benefits
When setup correctly, Frontly will automatically find the matching row in your Users Spreadsheet every time your user logs in and make those fields available inside the user data source all throughout the app.
Additionally, all of your custom user fields will be neatly organized and referenced from your User Spreadsheet instead of your app, as an alternative to entering them in-app detailed in this article.
Imagine you have a sheet with users, their emails, and a field called 'favorite_animal':
In setup mode, you can access the variable like this:
In live mode, it will appear like this:
Requirements
To use this feature, you must have a column in your spreadsheet called 'email' in lowercase with no other characters or spaces. Frontly will use this to locate the row with the matching email address.
Emails must match perfectly. If there are duplicate records with the same email, the first matching record will be used.
Additional Note: Core Frontly user fields first_name, last_name, username, email, id, user_groups, is_owner will remain as fields processed in-app, and will be ignored if their fields and values are updated into a User Spreadsheet. Therefore, this will not be a viable method to modify these core fields.
Updating Values in User Spreadsheet
In situations where you would want to update the values in your user spreadsheet in-app, this will not happen automatically. Below is an overview of the areas your app will likely encounter this and how it can be proactively set up.
User Sign Up
Newly signed up users of your app and their details will not automatically update into your user spreadsheet. To make this happen, you need to configure a User Signup Action located in the 'Signup Settings' tab.
From here select the Google Sheet action and inside that action, pick your spreadsheet and make sure you're selecting the 'Create' action type. Fill the necessary user fields you wish to add to your user spreadsheet with the {{ user.Field }} variable, where 'Field' is the name of the name of the field you've enabled for sign up.
Important Note: For a field to appear in the user signup flow, you will also need to add this field as a Custom User Field with the 'Include in Signup' checkbox enabled.
Click here to learn more about the Custom User Field
Update Active User Field
Parts of your app flow may exist where you'll have to update a value from one of your user fields. This is essentially an equivalent function to the 'Update Active User' action for the user spreadsheet.
To achieve this, simply set up a 'Google Sheet' action with the 'Action Type' set to 'Edit'. The easiest way to set it up from there is to set your 'Row ID' value to {{ user.email }} and the 'Row Column' value to email one.
The remaining fillable fields of this action are open-ended for you to decide which fields are updated and what values they get updated to!
Edit Profile
The edit profile is the one area of your active app that will automatically sync any updated values into your user spreadsheet. From the 'Edit Profile' tab, just ensure you've specified the fields of your spreadsheet you want to make editable by your users here.
