Question

I have a spreadsheet with a UI app script. The app reads/updates from the spreadsheet.

My current settings are: Execute the app as “me”.

Who has access to the app: “anyone”.

I’m essentially sending out workflows that have assignments by email. Those emails can be outside of the domain but would all be gmail addresses.

I had hoped I’d be able to access the Session.getActiveUser() as I need to allow certain functionality on the app based on user accessing the UiApp. That function does not seem to provide any info unless I’m logged in as the script owner. Session.getActiveUser() is blank when accessing from a different address.

Is there a way to get the active user without having to Execute the app as “User accessing the app”. I’d rather not have to share the spreadsheet with all the end users.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Rewrite from comments for readability :

Sharing the spreadsheet in this context doesn’t mean anybody could open the spreadsheet directly as a document as long as the url of the spreadsheet remains unknown. The app will indeed need to have access to it if you deploy your app as ‘User accessing the webapp’ but no one can find the url of the sheet unless you publish it. I use this configuration very often but of course I don’t know your exact use case… 😉 In my case the app itself determines what a specific user can do or not (by enabling /disabling certain functions / panels depending on the logged user.

Here is an example of an app like this, can you find the source spreadsheet ?

My spreadsheet has “anyone with the link” so the app can read and write to it but the name of the spreadsheet and its url is unknown (except for me) so it never appears in the document list of the user even if the user “writes” something in the document through the webapp (since he never actually “opens” it). I checked that on different accounts and never found any exception.