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Impersonate another user

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Use impersonation to execute business logic on behalf of another Microsoft Dataverse user to provide a desired feature or service using the appropriate role and object-based security of that impersonated user.

Impersonation can be used by various clients and services to call the Dataverse web services on behalf of a Dataverse user.

Impersonation involves two different user accounts:

Impersonator Impersonated user
User account used when executing code User account that the task is being performed on behalf of.

Required privileges

The impersonator needs the privilege Act on Behalf of Another User (prvActOnBehalfOfAnotherUser), which is included in the Delegate security role or can be enabled for any security role.

Note

Remember that users can be associated with more than one security role. Assigning the Delegate security role to a user will grant them the prvActOnBehalfOfAnotherUser privilege as well as the privileges provided by any other security roles associated with the user account.

The actual set of privileges that is used to modify data is the intersection of the privileges that the impersonator user possesses with that of the impersonated user.

In other words, the impersonator is allowed to do something if and only if the impersonator and the impersonated user have the privilege necessary for the action.

Direct assignment required

The Act on Behalf of Another User privilege (prvActOnBehalfOfAnotherUser), or a role containing that privilege, must be assigned directly to users since it can't be inherited through a Team. This direct assignment is needed because of the sensitive nature of the privilege.

Impersonation with Server-to-Server authentication

If you're creating a web client application that requires a user account that can act on behalf of a subscribing user, you can use the special application user account so that you don't need to use a paid Dataverse user license.

More information: Build web applications using Server-to-Server (S2S) authentication.

Impersonate another user using the Web API

To impersonate a user, add a request header named CallerObjectId with a GUID value equal to the impersonated user's Microsoft Entra ID object identifier before sending the request to the web service. The user's Microsoft Entra ID object identifier is included in the SystemUser.AzureActiveDirectoryObjectId.

More information: Impersonate another user using the Web API.

Impersonate another user using the SDK for .NET

To impersonate another user, set the CallerId property to the Guid value of the impersonated user. The following classes that implement IOrganizationService include this property.

Impersonate another user using plug-ins

You can register a plug-in containing code to specify the user that the operations should use. More information: Impersonate a user.

See also

Build web applications using Server-to-Server (S2S) authentication
Impersonate another user using the Web API
Write a plug-in