Overview

This article describes the process of importing users and groups and also provides recommendations to avoid any potential issues.

Subject

User, Group, and Role administration have a number of complexities that makes streamlining the process difficult with many regards. Hence using XML imports to manage users and groups may cause erroneous behavior w.r.t relationship tables that associate groups to users, users to roles and group to roles. Also, this process may lead to orphaned records, and unexpected behavior such as groups not showing up when you look up from a form and inconsistent sys_ids

      Thus it is recommended to perform this task manually. Manually adding users to groups creates the necessary relationship records for them to be a part of the group as well as inheriting the roles. This is also beneficial when removing the roles/groups/user records.

Additional Information

The general idea if you are importing bulk users from an excel spreadsheet would be

1.Import the groups to the groups' table with Importing data using import sets / Transform Map 
2. Assign the roles to the groups manually.
3. Then import the users with an import set, and break the users into their appropriate groups via a transform script.