insufficient access rights on cross-reference id when contact created from customer community and before trigger tries to update owner

Question

We are trying to update the contact owner of a new contact created via the customer community in the before trigger and receiving the following error.

insufficient access rights on cross-reference id

The same code works completely fine in the after trigger. The customer profile have read/write access to account and contact in the community sharing setting

Answer 1

I've done a lot of troubleshooting on this... this is what i did to solve all the errors:

Portal user cannot edit own account and cannot create new contacts (portal users cannot own partner accounts)

Answer 2

If you need to update OwnerId of contact with the same user for all the records, you can configure it in Community Preferences instead of trigger.

Follow these steps:

• Go to All Communities
• Select the Community you are working on
• Click on Administration
• Select Preferences
• Under Record Ownership, set a Default Owner

Answer 3

After a lot of troubleshooting, we found out that the issue was with the community permission for users. Since the community user was not permitted to see other users, the trigger was unable to assign the case owner as the internal user(because before trigger checks all the permissions and FLS)

To resolve the issue, go to Setup > Sharing Setting and check the User visibility checkboxes.