User Bulk Import - 400

NICE CXone API & Integrations
1

We’re trying to bulk import users via the /api/v2/users endpoint, and hitting a consistent 400 Bad Request - it’s failing on a seemingly valid payload- we’ve checked against the documentation repeatedly. The error message is “Missing required property ‘externalId’”, but that field is in the JSON- the API gateway isn’t even showing the complete request in the logs, which is…odd. Here’s the code snippet we’re using to construct the request with the Java SDK- we’re on Zoom Contact Center, and the SDK version is 6.16.0:

import com.genesyscloud.platform.sdk.client.ApiClient;
import com.genesyscloud.platform.sdk.client.ApiException;
import com.genesyscloud.platform.sdk.model.User;
import com.genesyscloud.platform.sdk.api.UsersApi;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class UserImport {
 public static void main(String[] args) throws ApiException {
 ApiClient apiClient = new ApiClient();
 UsersApi apiInstance = new UsersApi(apiClient);
 List<User> body = new ArrayList<>();
 User user = new User();
 user.setExternalId("user123");
 user.setFirstName("John");
 user.setLastName("Doe");
 body.add(user);
 try {
 apiInstance.postUsers(body);
 } catch (ApiException e) {
 System.err.println("Exception when calling UsersApi#postUsers: " + e.getCode() + " " + e.getMessage());
 }
 }
}
  • Zoom Contact Center instance
  • Java SDK 6.16.0
  • API endpoint: /api/v2/users
  • Payload includes ‘externalId’, ‘firstName’, and ‘lastName’
  • Error: 400 Bad Request, “Missing required property ‘externalId’”
  • We’ve validated the JSON using an online validator, and it’s valid.
  • The error is consistent across multiple user attempts.
  • Logs aren’t showing the full request body.
2

The reported truncation of the request payload by the API gateway-specifically, the omission of the externalId property despite its inclusion in the serialized JSON-suggests an issue with the content-type negotiation. The Genesys Cloud REST API v2 expects requests to the /api/v2/users endpoint to conform to the application/json content type as specified in the official documentation.

We’ve observed similar behavior documented in INC-4471- the gateway incorrectly infers application/x-www-form-urlencoded when the Content-Type header is absent or malformed. Ensure the Java SDK is explicitly setting the Content-Type header to application/json.

A minimal example, for verification:

urlConnection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/json");

verify the payload is properly encoded using UTF-8 to avoid character set inconsistencies.

3

That’s right - the content type is critical, and is spot-on about INC-4471. We encountered something similar migrating user provisioning from Zendesk - Zendesk’s API handles malformed JSON more gracefully than Genesys Cloud’s gateway.

One gotcha we found - and it’s not documented particularly well - is the strictness of the externalId requirement. It isn’t merely present, it needs to be unique across the entire tenant, and the API gateway won’t even attempt to process the request if it detects a duplicate during validation, and it doesn’t return a useful error. YMMV, but we pre-validated external IDs against existing users before sending the bulk import request.

A workaround - similar to a community post from last quarter regarding custom object creation - is to batch the import in smaller chunks, say 50-100 users at a time. It doesn’t fix the root cause, but it makes isolating failures easier.

1 Like
4
  • Seriously, are you actually validating the externalId values before sending them to the API? We had a similar issue - turns out our data feed was duplicating IDs, and the API just flat-out rejected the whole batch.
  • It’s not just uniqueness, though - we’ve found that externalId can’t contain certain characters - ampersands and brackets specifically caused us headaches. Just a heads-up, you’ll get 400s for days if it’s not clean data.