Skills property is causing 404 unknown error in select query parameter, while other string collections are working fine.

Question

I am trying to fetch the details of users in my department including their skills. But when I try to do that with https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users?$filter=department eq {dept-name}&$count=true&$select=displayName,jobTitle,mail,officeLocation,skills I get a 404 Unknown Error with no error message as shown in screenshot.

If I remove the skills property but use a different string collection like businessPhones or assignedLicenses, the call gets executed successfully.

Moreover, if instead of using filter I manually enter the user ID and query like https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/{user-id}?$select=displayName,jobTitle,mail,officeLocation,skills I can see the results for the particular userId.

Also, if I just query without a userId nor filter like https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users?$count=true&$select=displayName,jobTitle,mail,officeLocation,skills to query for all, it still gives the same error. But removing skills from the select executes the call properly with 200 status OK result.

Please help resolve this error. And let me know if more details are required.

Any workaround for getting the skills of all the users in one department is also appreciated. My main goal is to get data in as few calls to API as possible.

Answer 1

Hello Ausresh Sarangu,

Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Support!

After our tests, we ran into the same problem as you. The $select query parameter worked fine for all the other attributes, but it got an error whenever it encountered skills, and we still got an error when we filtered the attribute alone, as shown below:

It can be inferred that this error may be caused by the Graph endpoint, and we have consulted the relevant documentation, which clearly indicates that the parameter supports $select, which is obviously an error on the Graph API side.

Therefore, it is recommended that you provide feedback here or open a support ticket with Microsoft Support to give feedback to the API owner.

Hope this helps.

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Answer 2

Hi Ausresh Sarangu,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft!

I tried to reproduce the issue on my end and encountered the same error. As a workaround, you can try the following steps:

1. Search by Keywords: If skills are stored in fields like aboutMe or custom attributes, you can search for users by keywords. For example, to find users with the skill "Python"

         GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users?$search="Python" 
   

2. Filter by Custom Attributes: If your organization uses custom attributes for skills (e.g., extension_SkillSet), you can filter users based on those fields:

         GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users?$filter=extension_SkillSet eq 'Python'
   

Hope this helps.

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