I found:
And I wanted to confirm that this has not changed as of LTS 8.2?
Right now I’m trying to pop up a message of the user which has previously checked out an order. Currently the UID is presented instead of a name even though the variable type is set to “User”.
I have tried the following but it only produces “null” for the message:
b ' + @Table Record.Selected_MRB_Record.Work Order Number + ' successfully checked out to ' + user_id_to_user(totext(@Variable.CheckOutEmployee ))
Hey @Richard-SNN,
That looks right - are you sure that CheckOutEmployee or Work Order Number are not null, which would result in the entire expression being nullified?
Yes, If I just use CheckOutEmployee then it works fine but shows the UID instead of the User name.
I tried simplfying the whole expression to user_id_to_user(totext(@Variable.CheckOutEmployee )) and it still produced a null.
Sorry for the confusion @Richard-SNN.
It looks like I was wrong - it might be null because it’s detecting the user id with quotes as "randomID", which you can use TRIM(TOTEXT(user), '"') to replace. However, in show message, it’s still reporting the name as part of the user object. I don’t think there’s an easy way to pull the user’s plain text name without:
Using the current logged in user, which you can extract the name of.
Using some form of secondary storage where you store the user object and a plain text name representation (i.e. if you pull from a user column in a table you would also store the plain text name).
I’m going to follow up on an open product suggestion we have to extract the user’s name from their user object.
Hi @Grant ,
maybe you should consider adding a “by ID” option in user-based trigger functionalities.
Then it would be possible to access all of the User Fields.
It would also be useful, to access the User-Table with a record placeholder as all other Tulip-Tables.
In this case, it’s unlikely to be the currently logged in user. We allowing engineers to “check out” orders from a storage location and keeping a transaction log of who has the order checked out.
Yeah, I think we need a way to extract the name reliably from a user object. That’s how I’m planning to structure the suggestion. Either by accessing the child attribute similar to what is possible with the current logged-in user or through some expression.
Any update to being able to extract a text user name from a user variable?
Hi @jmurray, thanks for bumping this thread. This has not been updated. I’ll share this with the product team and see if there’s some additional context I can share.
@John Thank you. I think this will be very useful.
I ended up making a custom widget to do this.
Hey Jonathan,
Neat! I’m glad you were able to find a way to do this. Do you mind sharing the code for your CW for anyone else who may want to use it?
From the product side, our team is focused on higher-priority initiatives that align with our current roadmap, so we still don’t have immediate plans to work on this. However, we’ll continue to track interest in this request and revisit if it continues to get more votes and interest!
I will flag your CW widget idea to our library team. We could potentially get that into the library as a interim option 
I added the ability for it to extract the initials as well. I would welcome any suggestions.
customWidget-User To Text Name.json (3.1 KB)
Hello Jonathan, we also have a Users API with a GET endpoint that you could use here: /api/users/v1/users/{userId} - users
It takes a user ID as a paramter, and returns metadata about the user including the name. I would also call this a workaround, but at least allows you to do it in trigger logic without a custom widget.
Thank you @kevin.kononenko
Using the workaround suggested using an API via a connector worked for me.
I also had to use the trim suggestion from grant
TRIM(TOTEXT(@Table Record.My Placeholser.My User Object), ‘"’)
Image of both API setup + calling the connector in app:
