PowerApps corrupts property names of global variable after publishing

[bobesponja]

I have a variable gblUserProfile that stores user data (fullname, email, employeeid) to show names in GUI and for data filtering. (It isn't stored in a Formula because (1) it needs to be accessed offline (2) it needs to be changeable by admins via a hidden control to test for bugs.) This gets referenced as gblUserProfile.fullname and gblUserProfile.email. These values used to come from an imported Excel column, but we switched to a Formula in hopes it would get rid of the issue (it didn't, but having less overhead for changing this data is nice).

WIth every second publish or so, after the app editor is closed, these two properties are changed to gblUserProfile.'data-ADB4D7A662F548B49FAC2B986E348A1Bfullname' and gblUserProfile.'data-ADB4D7A662F548B49FAC2B986E348A1Bemail' at exactly 13 different points in the app. Most of these points are just a read-only text field in a custom component that displays the user's fullname, and then a few others in the Update properties of certain form data cards. It doesn't happen *every* time that one of those fields is referenced in an instance of that custom component or in a datacard's Update property, but only happens in these 13 cases (I haven't tested if it's the same fields each time or if it's just a random number that always adds up to 13, but the latter seems very unlikely).

I haven't started working with this app until more recently, so I don't know how long it's been a problem. I'd like to avoid deleting items if possible, but if that's what it takes, I'll do it. I'm just not really sure why this happens.

EDIT: just tried deleting and replacing one of the custom components that gets a corrupted property name. After two cycles of save -> publish -> close, it got corrupted again in the same spot. Renaming the component also did not help. The only options left I can think of are either (1) enabling "Allow automatic field assignment for component inputs" (retired feature, may disappear) and have it deal with the problem or (2) remake the ap from scratch (undesirable due to time cost but possible)

[bobesponja]

No luck today, either. I have reduced the amount of affected locations to 6 by referring to gblUserProfile.fullname in the default text of the actual Components design view itself rather than placing it in the text field of every individual instance in the Screens view (though I did leave one instance in the Screens view untouched so I could confirm when a publish contains corrupted names).

After ruling out the deleting of custom components, I decided to try a workaround by creating a second column called "data-ADB4D7A662F548B49FAC2B986E348A1Bfullname" that has the same data as fullname. However, after 2 save-publish-close cycles, the affected areas were now referring to a *new* nonexistent column called gblUserProfile.'data-ADB4D7A662F548B49FAC2B986E348A1Bdata-ADB4D7A662F548B49FAC2B986E348A1Bfullname' (except for the lone custom component, which just referred to gblUserProfile.'data-ADB4D7A662F548B49FAC2B986E348A1Bfullname' as before), so I guess it's just appending "data-ADB4D7A662F548B49FAC2B986E348A1B" to the start of the property name references at these 6 points. 

Also, I've noticed that, even though the second save-publish garbles the property names (as seen in the published app), the editor won't actually show that this has happened until the next time you open the editor. I also just did another test and found that publishing isn't necessary to trigger the issue, as just saving and closing the app twice triggered it again.