Search range in Entra ID too limited

Question

Hello! One of our departments uses a B2C directory for member registration.

The staff of the dept in question used to be able to find a member's record quite easily using the search bar, but yesterday they reported that this function is no longer working as expected, so produces no results.

What seems to be happening is that any string submitted is only being used to search against the 'Name' column, whereas the data they're trying to search against is the 'User name' column which contains each member's email address (further testing shows that the search will also work against the User Principal Name field, but these all contain the object ID in the format "******@ourdomain.onmicrosoft.com)".

Rightly or wrongly (I'd argue 'wrongly', but it's out of my hands), the interface that gathers the info from each member during the registration process results in the 'Name' field in each member record containing "unknown", so nothing will be useful there!

Here's a screenshot of the main list:

Now, if we try a search like this, we get a result from an entry (of a member of staff) who has some meaningful data in their 'Name' field...:

...but we don't get this entry returned (for example, there may be others that start with "marc"):

As mentioned above, searching with part of the start of the UPN will also find the record, but that's just not going to be a pragmatic approach since the contents of that field are not exactly human-friendly!

So, at the moment I'm not sure what to suggest to the staff who need to find member records. As I said, they used to be able to find records quite easily, so what's changed...other than the change of the name from Azure Active Directory to Entra ID? (Or is that not such a mere coincidence!?)

Answer 1

Hi @Jeff Jeffery ,

Thanks for reaching out and I can totally understand your concern and frustration here.

There has no change in Micrsoft Entra ID in terms of Azure AD B2C.

In Azure AD or Microsoft Entra ID , it is mandatory to provide Display Name while creating the user.

In Azure AD B2C, it is optional to collect "Display Name" attribute from user while registering the user.

Failed to received display name results in add "Unknown" in Name field in Azure AD B2C.

Azure AD B2C filters the data based on both Name and User Name (provided you need to search with full user name i.e the email address provided by user while registering the application).

in your scenario, there might be chances that user name search was not working for that particular time and it was taking some time if list is large)

I tried to test one case based on your scenario and able to filter user with User Name.

So I would recommend collecting the display name while registering the user in the future and search with the exact user name for now to get the user's details.

Hope this will help.

Thanks, Shweta

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Answer 2

Thanks, Shweta I'm afraid I don't get the same result as you. If I copy a User Name value from a record to the clipboard then paste that value in to the search field I get 'No result':

However, if I use the link to '...switch back to the legacy users list experience', I do get a result:

...but, as you pointed out, only with the complete value (so searching with "m*********@hotmail.com" would work, but not with "m*********@hotmail"). This behaviour in the new Entra-style interface looks like a glitch, to me.