Cannot Change User Type?

[Brownschuh]

I'm running into an issue where I cannot change the User Type for an account in Portal (v 10.9.1); a task I've done many times before with no problems.  But this time I am prompted with the message: "Members assigned the Viewer user type cannot own items and/or group."

Cool, I get that; make sure the user owns/hosts nothing.  But here's the thing, the user owns no items, not the owner of any groups, nor is a member of any groups, and has zero add-on licenses.  What gives?  Do I have to delete this account to even make some basic changes?  I'm tempted to pursue the delete option as this is a dev environment, but this is frustrating as a admin when simple changes don't work and are NOT consistent.  Plus I would not want to delete a user in production as this causes a whole host of problems ...

[RyanUthoff]

If it is saying that you can't change the user type because they own content/groups, even though they don't, then there is a chance that it won't let you delete the account for the same reason. I had this same problem and had to reach out to Esri support and they were able to tell me how to force delete the account. If you're unable to delete the account, I might be able to dig up the details of what Esri support told me to do if you're interested.

[Brownschuh]

That would be great if you could dig up and share that information.  I did indeed try to delete that account but was greet with an error stating:  "Unable to delete member: <UserName>.  Member must not own items or groups."  Like I mentioned before, the user owns or is a part of anything on the Portal site.

[RyanUthoff]

Of course the usual disclaimer applies and make sure you have backups, etc. before doing anything.

First of all, reindex your Portal first just in case that helps. That was the first troubleshooting step, but that didn't help me.

• Go to the Portal rest endpoint (https://webadaptorhost.domain.com/webadaptorname/sharing/rest) and login with an admin account.
• After logging in, go to the home page of the rest endpoint and click Users and search for the user you cannot delete.
• At the very bottom of the user page, you should see a User Content button. Click it. This will give you a list of all the content that user owns. (If you don't see any content here, you can ignore the rest because something else must be wrong).
• Click the item, although you might get a message saying you don't have permissions to access it (even as an admin).
  • If you can access it, try to delete the item from that page, but I had the permission issue.
• RDP into the Portal machine, stop the Portal service, and navigate to C:\arcgisportal\content\items
• Create a new folder and name the folder as the Item ID number from the rest endpoint (the ID will be in the name of the item).
  
  • Note: If the folder with that ID already exists, delete the contents of it and follow the steps below
• Inside the folder, copy the contents of any other working item into the folder you just created.
• Start the Portal service
• Try to delete the item from the Portal rest endpoint (might need to do a full reindex).
  • In my case, the item just magically disappeared and I didn't have to "delete" anything, but support did tell me to delete the item if it was still there.

Hopefully that will work for you. If you don't see that user owning any items in the Portal rest endpoint, then there must be some other issue. And I'm not sure how to resolve it if they own an orphaned group or something, but this worked for me for an orphaned item.

[Brownschuh]

Thank you, I will have to work with my IT team to RDP into our servers, but I will give it a go hopefully sometime next week.

[Brownschuh]

Ok so I was lucky and was able to change the user type without having to delete the user.  Here's what I did:

• Went to Portal rest endpoint (https://webadaptorhost.domain.com/webadaptorname/sharing/rest) and logged in with an admin account.
• Clicked Users at the bottom of the page and searched for the troublesome account.
• Clicked on the User Content button and discovered there was some code that the user still had attached to their account. 
• Clicked Delete Item button.
• Navigated back to the Portal site > Organization > Members > selected the user and changed the User type from Creator to Viewer (plus the Role).

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction; somehow I was not aware of that Portal rest endpoint site.

[RyanUthoff]

Awesome, glad it was much easier for you!