Metadata not using cell names to assign metadata

[eheinrichs]

I performed an analysis on 500,000 cells out of my 1 million plus dataset, and when trying to add the results back in as metadata they are not assigned to the proper cells. In fact, all of my cells seem to have values assigned to them in the new metadata column, even though I only provided 500,000 datapoints. I am providing a data frame where the rows are the cell names that it is supposed to match to.

Even if I remove the cell names and just provide a list of 500,000 values, it still fills all the metadata, and doesnt give me the error it used to in a similar situation (Warning: Cannot add more or less meta data without cell names). Has how metadata is added changed?

Edit: after doing some subsetting and looking more at the data it appears that two situations are happening:
1 - if a cell is in the list of new metadata, it is properly assigned its metadata
2 - if a cell is NOT in the list of new metadata, it is improperly assigned metadata based on its position. so if it is the second cell in your dataset, it gets assigned the second metadata value in the metadata file, even though it should be assigned nothing at all