Failure of _ValidIf constraint

[mcopp0315]

Hi guys!  I am very stuck with this one...

This is a public app and I have created all of the constraints for this column that I can think of,  yet it is still allowing users to enter an alpha value.  The app doesn't throw the error message, allows the form to be submitted, and the field writes nothing to the database (Google Sheet)

After collecting literally tens of thousands of submissions with this form, the issue is admittedly rare, yet a significant problem.  From my testing and user feedback, the following potential trends are

• always the letter 'e' is allowable
• when 'e' is entered, the decimal character is NOT able to be entered
• often the affected submissions are from non-US geographies

ANY ideas, insight, tips would be extremely helpful!

Column Details

failure

ValidIf Expression

[Former Community Member]

In this context, I believe the 'e' indicates scientific notation, e.g. `10e2` is `10 * 10 ** 2` is `1000`. This of course makes little sense when `e` is the first "digit."

I would be surprised if we supported this on purpose; it just so happens that the HTML5 number input accepts them (and doesn't accept a decimal after the `e`).

I'll flag this with the rest of the webapp team, we might be able to fix this (though the risk is that somewhere out there, someone is depending on this behavior).

[mcopp0315]

Thank you for the response.

Yes, I deduced the same about the character 'e', but only was using it as a demonstration

It is highly unlikely that clients are intentionally entering that character when logging their measurements on the form.  We can assume they (somehow) are entering characters such as "inches" or "cm" in that field

A followup hunch is that these users have their device language or keyboard set to a language other than US English.  Do you have any insight as to weather this may affect which characters are allowed?  Could it be possible AppSheet fails to discern letters from numbers when a device is configured to French, Italian, or Portuguese by default?

Thank you again for lending a hand

[SkrOYC]

Hi @Former Community Member

I just jumped here to suggest you to get feedback before any change since as you said someone could be using the current behavior.

It happened to me with TEXT(), it was "fixed" to consider locale but it was working on just english for years and at this point it was expected to keep doing it