EnsureUser() will return the following error "The specified user could not be found. "

Question

I am working on developing a server side event receiver inside sharepoint on-premises farm 2013. Inside the code i have the following, which will retrieve a string from a drop down list column representing a user name such as (User.A). the drop down list column name is OrderAssignToApprover , then I will convert the string to SPUSer:-

string approver = currentItem["OrderAssignToApprover"].ToString();
SPUser spUser = properties.Site.RootWeb.EnsureUser(approver);

now for certain user only the EnsureUser will return this exception:-

The specified user User.A could not be found. 

so i thought that the user is deleted or is disabled, but i try adding the user to a sharepoint security group and assign it to a people or group field, and i was able to do so without any problem.. so seems the user is valid, but not sure why EnsureUser will return an exception..

EDIT. Now i checked with our system admins and seems the user's account was disabled inside the AD. so this means that EnsureUser will not work on accounts which have been disabled. so now my question should be if there is a way to convert a string (representing a user's login name) to SPUser object, while the username's account is disabled inside AD?? seems EnsureUser will not support this.. so are there other function or workarounds?

Answer 1

Can you check if the user's are still enabled in AD? This error can be occurred as if the user is not enabled in AD, though it will still show as an SP User.

Please let me know what happens.

Answer 2

There are few caveats you need to check when working with EnsureUser

EnsureUser will work only if the user is available in that particular Site collection. Check if user is available in any site group

If you have that user in your site collection, probably you need to get the encoded claim value to be passed to that method.

SPClaimProviderManager cpm = SPClaimProviderManager.Local;

SPClaim userClaim = cpm.ConvertIdentifierToClaim("domain\\username",

SPIdentifierTypes.WindowsSamAccountName);

using (SPSite theSite = newSPSite(“https://www.contoso.com"))

{

     SPWeb theWeb = theSite.OpenWeb();

     SPUser theUser = theWeb.EnsureUser(userClaim.ToEncodedString());

}

Answer 3

I worked with EnsureUser and found out that there are a few inconveniences. For example, we need almost always to use elevated privileges to deal with EnsureUser, otherwise exception will be thrown. Or for example, if user doesn't exist in user collection, it will be tried to add to this collection, but this means that spWeb object will be modified and it's required AllowUnsafeUpdates = true.
What does EnsureUser does is, "It checks whether the specified login name belongs to a valid user of the Web site, and if the login name does not already exist, adds it to the Web site." Which happens to be exactly what we want! Now we can finish our code:

SPUser newUser = newWeb.EnsureUser(string loginName);
newWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

Answer 4

As per the description of ENSUREUSER on MSDN the username should include domain name,so ensure domain name. Also the column OrderAssignToApprover should be of type User.

Regards,