How to filter users by userType = null?

Question

I am trying to filter out Guest users in my Graph query. Since the ne comparison operator is not supported I was trying $filter=userType eq 'Member' or userType eq null instead. That fails too though. Any known workarounds to list users with null as userType?

Without that I need to download about a million rows each time and throw 4 out of 5 away on the client side, which is pretty slow and wasteful.

{
"error": {
    "code": "Request_UnsupportedQuery",
    "message": "Unsupported or invalid query filter clause specified for property 'userType' of resource 'User'.",
    "innerError": {
        "request-id": "411f7927-c3af-4042-a619-eee1c88971a0",
        "date": "2018-03-17T18:28:35"
    }
}

Answer 1

As a general rule of thumb, userType should be either Member or Guest. The exception to this is when you're syncing an on-prem Active Directory. Since userType is an Azure AD property, the value for a synced user will be null.

If you can safely assume that your on-prem users are not guests, you can filter Azure AD user's based on if they're synced or cloud-native. You do this by looking at the onPremisesSyncEnabled property. For synced users, this will be true, for cloud-native users it will be null.

If you combine this with the userType property, you can effectively retrieve only non-guest users using the following $filter:

$filter=onPremisesSyncEnabled eq true OR userType eq 'Member'

You can also avoid this entirely if you Enable synchronization of UserType in Azure AD Connect.

Answer 2

Update as of June 2021

the ne comparison operator is now supported on userType on graph! So you can now get users that are not guest users with this query: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/?$filter=userType ne 'guest'&$count=true

edit: Important to note that this is an advanced query as so it requires the header ConsistencyLevel to be set to eventual and include the $count=true query parameter

here is a link to graph explorer with the query that you can run