Examples: Deactivate and Reactivate Users with SCIM

In Salesforce, you deactivate user objects rather than deleting them. By deactivating a user object, the user’s active status becomes false. Even though you can still query the user object, the user can’t log in to Salesforce with the deactivated account. To allow a user to log in, you can reactivate their account.

Required Editions

Available in: Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience

Available in: All Editions

To see how to deactivate and reactivate user accounts, view the following examples.

Deactivate a User with PATCH

To deactivate a user, send a PATCH request to the Users endpoint, as shown in this example.

Request:

PATCH https://mycompany.my.salesforce.com/services/scim/v2/Users/<user_Id>

{
  "schemas": [
    "urn:ietf:params:scim:api:messages:2.0:PatchOp"
  ],
  "Operations": [
    {
      "op": "replace",
      "value": {
        "active": false
      }
    }
  ]
}

Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
…

{
  "schemas": [
    "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:User",
    "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User"
  ],
  "id": "0054W00000...",
  "userName": "scimuser@mycompany.com",
  "externalId": "scimUser",
  "name": {
    "formatted": "User Scim",
    "familyName": "Scim",
    "givenName": "User"
  },
  "displayName": "User Scim",
  "nickName": "user2",
  "emails": [
    {
      "type": "work",
      "primary": true,
      "value": "user@mycompany.com"
    }
...  

  "meta": {
    "created": "2020-10-22T06:21:45Z",
    "lastModified": "2020-10-25T09:21:43Z",
    "location": "https://mycompany.my.salesforce.com/services/scim/v2/Users/0054W000...",
    "resourceType": "User",
    "version": "6a91c1386738961d6b223b2c6ef860715f2ab155"
  }
}

Deactivate a User with DELETE

You can also deactivate a user with a DELETE request, as shown here. The result is the same as deactivating a user with a PATCH request. The user object’s active status is updated to false. In this example, notice that the response code only includes an HTTP code. This code indicates that the request is successful.

Request:

DELETE https://mycompany.my.salesforce.com/services/scim/v2/Users/<user_id>

Response:

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content

Reactivate a User

You can reactivate a user object by sending a PATCH request to the Users endpoint. Here’s an example request.

Request:

PATCH https://mycompany.my.salesforce.com/services/scim/v2/Users/<user_id>

{
  "schemas": [
    "urn:ietf:params:scim:api:messages:2.0:PatchOp"
  ],
  "Operations": [
    {
      "op": "replace",
      "value": {
        "active": true
      }
    }
  ]
}

Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
…

{
  "schemas": [
    "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:core:2.0:User",
    "urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User"
  ],
  "id": "0054W00000CVREkQAP",
  "userName": "scimuser@mycompany.com",
  "externalId": "scimUser",
  "name": {
    "formatted": "User Scim",
    "familyName": "Scim",
    "givenName": "User"
  },
  "displayName": "User Scim",
  "nickName": "user2",
  "emails": [
    {
      "type": "work",
      "primary": true,
      "value": "user@mycompany.com"
    }
  ...

  "meta": {
    "created": "2020-10-22T06:21:45Z",
    "lastModified": "2020-10-25T15:18:57Z",
    "location": "https://mycompany.my.salesforce.com/services/scim/v2/Users/0054W00000CVREkQAP",
    "resourceType": "User",
    "version": "b5f45d87e1a39af1f10ef8d16fd7f61a30c171ed"
  }
}