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Help me understand Portal Registrations

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Posted on by BioGroBen

Hi there,

For a bit of context, I work for a company that certifies organic products. We have a Dynamics/power pages portal where our clients can log in to complete various digital forms required.

We set up a contact within Dynamics, and send them an invitation which is redeemed, allowing them to register to the portal.

Now the issue I am having is getting a user to re-register with an email that has previously been used for another client. While its uncommon, we do have several contractors that work for several different clients, which means on occasion they may want to switch their email from one client record to another. The issue here is when you try and reregister the contact, the error "A user with the specified ID already exists. Please choose a different one." appears. Now this makes sense, however how can I remove any reference for the original user login, so I can allow this user to register again? I tried deleting the contact, no luck, I tried deleting the invitation redemption records, again no luck. I assume there is some other record somewhere else that has held onto the details despite the contact having been removed. Any advice would be well received, I am losing my mind here.

Many thanks in advance,

Ben

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Fubar 8,491 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Are you using Local Login or an Identity Provider eg. Azure B2C?
If Local Login, do you have Login Names or only Email addresses (e.g. when the user registers do they have input fields for both)? (fyi: if you are using local login with login names, there is possibly a Site Setting).

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BioGroBen 30 on at

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Hi there Fubar,

Thanks for your response. We are using an identity provider, I believe Azure B2C.
usernames are simply the email associated with the invited contact.
Many thanks for your help!

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Fubar 8,491 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Are they trying to re-register in Azure B2C? If so, they will be getting a message from Azure B2C (they just need to sign-in to B2C not re-register). Azure B2C is the identity provider for the person (not the organization they are attached to) - think of it like logging in with your Facebook Account.

If you have Portal User that is setup against 1 Parent Account, to move them to a different Account you just need to update that persons Dataverse Contact record changing the Parent Account field - note: this change will not take affect immediately and can take up to 15 mins which is Microsofts SLA but will usually happen within a couple of minutes (or will be immediate after a power pages sync, or restart).

(if you do need to update the email address that is stored in B2C, then it would need to be done in Azure B2C not in PowerPages/Dataverse - but this is not the scenario you have described)

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BioGroBen 30 on at

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Hiya,

So I have tried multiple times just changing the parent account of the contact, but no luck.

When I change the parent account, and try to log in, I get redirected to our registration screen:
If I try and send an invitation code, when trying to register it says 'a user account with that ID already exists' which makes sense with your description of B2C.
To add to the confusion, we don't actually appear to use 'parent account' as the table that is linked to the contact, we use 'Licensee'. So all portal user contact records have a linked 'Licensee'(Account):

Thanks for your assistance, hopefully you have some more suggestions!
Ben

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Fubar 8,491 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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When you are getting put to the Registration page, is the user actually logged in, if using the standard nav bar / header their name will appear in the top right of the Web page (vs logged out it will have a Sigin link)

Whatever the linkage is between the Contact and account that would be the field you would use, usually this would be the Parent Account (and possibly is in your case, it could possibly just be renamed to licencee).

To test if it is just the cache refresh, you can, assign the out of the box Administrator Web Role to a different user and login using a different browser (note: must not be just a different tab in same browser), then use <yourportalurl>/_services/about this should load a page with a couple of buttons on it, then immediately after you change the account on the other user and save it, click the Clear Cache Button. then signin with the other user.

Note, being tied to an account/licencee would not be anything to do with you being redirected to the register page, unless someone has added some custom JavaScript (which would be a bit weird) - but it could be you have a returnUrl value in your url/link, if your coming from Azure B2C it is set to put the user there,

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BioGroBen 30 on at

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Hi there,

So I think it is working exactly as intended.
There is one thing though that still confuses me - Here is the process as I understand it:
Contact A is created in dynamics.
Contact A is invited through dynamics.
Contact A redeems invite, and is saved as an external identity.
If contact A is deleted, the external identity remains, however all dataverse relationships(and access) is revoked.
If a new contact B is created with the same email as contact A, when contact B logs in a new relationship between the pre-existing external identity and contact B is created.

What confuses me is where can I see the email addresses that have a relationship to the company, even if the original contact was deleted. They must be stored somewhere, or else when contact A is deleted and recreated as contact B, they would need to re-register.

I am sorry if this makes no sense, the TLDR is everything is working as intended, I just assumed when a contact was deleted, ALL references to that contact including email would also be deleted, requiring a standard invitation/registration process to regain access. I am unsure where I can see what email addresses are 'registered', as doing a find on all contacts with external identities WONT capture those email addresses of deleted portal contacts.

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