Using 1Password to fill my password overwrites a web form

Scintimandrion

Hi all,

I'm wondering if you can help me with a rather annoying aspect of my usage of 1Password. I'm currently using 1Password 4 for the Mac, Mountain Lion 10.8.5 as my OS, and Safari 6.1 as my principal web browser. I have, as far as I can tell, the most recent version of the 1Password plug-in installed.

One of the banks I bank with will, when I ask to do an online payment, ask for my password. So far, so good: I right-click on the password field on that page, select "1Password" from the context menu, and click on the bank's name. It will populate the password field with the actual password.

Unfortunately, at the same time, it also overwrites the contents of every other field on the page with my username, before going ahead and automatically submitting the form for me. It's so helpful that it completely screws the form up.

While I can work around this issue by ensuring that I click on the arrow by the bank's name, copy the password and paste it into the form, I believe there's another way I can tell 1Password that, no, I don't have a user name field on that particular page, and I only need the password to be filled, and only in that one place. Is that the case, or will I just need to do the "copy-paste" approach?

sjk

Hi, @Scintimandrion.

I'm sorry your having trouble with the 1P4 extension correctly filling that bank page.

What I suggest trying when you're on that page is entering just the password (plus any other required info) and saving a new Login item for it, like described in this article:

Saving a new Login manually

On future visits to that page try using that new Login item and only the required fields should be filled.

And if autosubmit is getting in the way you can disable it for a specific item in its main app details by selecting the Never submit option in the submit menu:

Or toggle it off/on for all items as described and shown in this article:

Easily toggle auto-submit

I hope that helps. :)

aquirt

I have similar issues, and not just with banks. This is an annoying bug that goes back at least to 1Password 3, and that I have reported before.

My setup is similar: Mountain Lion 10.8.5, Safari 6.1, and 1PW beta : Version 4.1.2.BETA-1 (412001). I have seen identical behaviour using Firefox. Extensions have been updated to the latest for all browsers.

Scenario: go to a web site that has a login page that begins with user ID and password, and also contains other fields below them. Click the 1PW button in the toolbar, and double click on a login. 1PW fills in the user ID and password correctly, but also fills some or all of the following fields of the web form with the user ID.

I have used the Show Web Form Details option to edit out all fields from the 1PW login entry except the user ID and password. Still behaves the same.

Turning off auto submit avoids a round of error messages from the web site, but it is still necessary to go through and manually erase all the unwanted copies of the user ID. As Scintimandrion points out, there is a workaround: copy the user ID and password individually from the 1PW entry and paste them into the web form in two extra steps. But the correct solution is to squash the bug. It makes no sense to fill (in some cases) dozens of unrelated fields with the user ID. User ID is sometimes not the first field on the page (though that is extremely common) but it is always clearly identified and occurs just once.

For an easy non-bank example, go to 407etr.com (probably well known to everyone from Agilebits who lives near Toronto) and click the Login link. You will get a form that begins with user ID and password for people who have set up an online account, and continues with alternative ID fields for people who want to create an account. 1PW correctly fills the account info, but also fills the Licence Plate field with the User ID. Autosubmit causes an error for an invalid licence plate number.

This page also has another potentially tricky feature: two different buttons Login and Continue, for the two situations. These seem to lead to two different Post commands and it may matter which one is triggered. Dealing with that could be complicated. But fixing the filling in of unwanted fields should be fairly easy. And once that is done, turning off Autosubmit would be a reasonable workaround if it is necessary to click the Login button.

aquirt

Update: Just tried to save a new login as suggested by oversoul. Nothing happened. No save dialog at all, and no new login entry appeared.

sjk

Hi, @aquirt.

I'm sorry that 1P4 form filling can be troublesome like this for you, too, along with the new problem with manually saving a new Login item.

For your 407etr.com example, after manually entering Email and Password fields on the Login page I had no trouble manually saving a new Login item for it. Its item details look like this:

Then when filling the page only those two fields were filled and it even auto-submitted correctly. So everything here worked as intended.

Let's first address your manual saving issue. Is it failing with every site you try? That you're not getting any feedback is unusual after being able to successfully invoke Save new Login from 1P mini. Had you opened 1P mini using the extension toolbar icon or with a keyboard shortcut?

So we can get a better idea of what's happening (or not, in this case) is please email us a Diagnostics Report from your Mac that's having this problem; instructions are here:

Sending us your Diagnostics Report to help us help you!

Please do not post your Diagnostics Report in the forum, but do include a link to this topic and your forum username in the email so we can "connect the dots" when we receive it. A quick comment here mentioning that you've sent it would also be helpful. Thanks in advance!

Scintimandrion

Thanks, @sjk and @aquirt, for your feedback.

With the help of @sjk's tip to save a new manual password, I found a solution that seems to work. Unfortunately, it's a bit complicated.

The trick, basically, is that a new password must be saved on that particular page with the misbehaving form. This is because, in order to avoid an overwriting scenario, every form field that is not to be auto-filled must be present in the web form details, with its "contents" set to the empty string. Unfortunately, to us mere mortals, it's not often clear what the programmers' names of the form fields are, hence the need to save the manual password.

In the long run, I suppose it would be good if any field that is not explicitly named in the web form details could be left untouched, but I suppose there could be reasons why that's more complicated than it first appears (e.g., login name fields going by various names).

sjk

Thanks for the followup, @Scintimandrion.

The trick, basically, is that a new password must be saved on that particular page with the misbehaving form. This is because, in order to avoid an overwriting scenario, every form field that is not to be auto-filled must be present in the web form details, with its "contents" set to the empty string.

Do you have a specific example of a site where you've encountered that "overwriting scenario"? We'd like to do some testing of that here. Thanks!