Dabble user values are one of the types of Field values.
When you configure a field to have a Dabble user value, Dabble will only allow the field to contain as its value a user in your application. The email address of the user (which is also the login name) is used as the actual value. In actual usage (when creating Filters or editing entries, a user’s address is chosen from a list — you don’t normally need to type the address manually.
The main purpose of Dabble user values is to allow you to assign ownership or responsibility for items to users in your application. The values will appear as email links when they are shown in a view, and an email link is shown beside the value when editing an entry.
You can change a field to have a Dabble user value using the Field configuration. When you do this, existing data will be used whenever possible: if the field contains a valid email address, it will be recognized as a user. If a field contains some text and Dabble cannot find a valid address in it, it will warn the user that the field contains Invalid data.
In the Field configuration there is one option you can change for Dabble user value fields. You can specify a default user for when entries are created with this field. This only applies to the future: existing entries will not have their values changed.
Dabble understands the special keyword “me” when writing Value filters for a field containing a Dabble user value. If you filter for “me” on such a field, it will always be interpreted as the user currently logged into the application.
The advantage of this is it allows you to save a view that will automatically be personalized for each user of the application. For example, if you create a calendar, you could use the “me” keyword to limit the calendar to only show the current user’s events (if you have a field containing the Dabble user) without needing to save a separate calendar view for each user.