3170987 - Users unexpectedly being made ACTIVE (Future Hires, Terminated Employees or Other Inactive Users)

You have observed in your system that Inactive users are being made Active unexpectedly.

The issue can affect users in various situations:

• Future Dated Hires - The user account is set to ACTIVE before the Hire Date
• Terminated Users - The user account is set to ACTIVE after the Termination Date
    
• Other types of Inactive Users / User Accounts 

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SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite

This situation can have a few different causes but most commonly we see it caused by some external integration set up by the customer / partner.

For example, some customers have processes which may update email addresses in the User Entity / Object (Basic User Information) after the user has been terminated.

By default, INACTIVE user records cannot be updated via API, they must be ACTIVE to be updated via API.

If they are INACTIVE and an update is attempted, the following error is thrown in response payload:

As such, we see some processes activate the users (as the error suggests)  to achieve the update and this is the cause of the unexpected activation of INACTIVE users.

If you observe this situation in your system OR this situation is confirmed to you by SAP Cloud Support as the cause of the issue,

We strongly recommend you explore the usage of the processInactiveEmployees=true parameter in process which is updating INACTIVE user records.

This parameter will allow you to update the inactive User's record while keeping them in the INACTIVE status.

Below you will see the same update attempted as shown in the cause section, but this time using the processInactiveEmployees=true parameter:

2768078 - SFOdata User Entity Update, Insert, Upsert Inactive Employee How to

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