Possible bug? Sub-selectors or pagefields not working when user is not logged in

[Pierre-Luc]

Has anyone seen this or could explain what could be wrong (on 2.4.0) ?

I have a page field which is a select for pages with the language template.

 

This is working either as a guest or logged-in user (tried with admin, not sure about others):

$discussions = $page->children("template=discussion, discussionLanguage=".$user->language);

 

While this is not when the user is a guest but works when logged in as admin:

$discussions = $page->children("template=discussion, discussionLanguage.title=".$user->language->title);

 

I'm not sure what's going on, this seems like a bug? While the first is valid, I would prefer to use the latter as I use a helper function to grab user languages with different variations according to the context:

function languageWithLocale($user) {

    return (string) $user->language->title; // typecast to string for usefulness

}

 

I've filed it as a possible bug : https://github.com/ryancramerdesign/ProcessWire/issues/544