Can Contacts see others Contacts that belong to a different Account?

Question

As a Customer Community User from account A, I want to see contacts that belong to account B Is the above possible?

I tried a Contact Sharing Rule without success and even a Manual Sharing (image attached, the one in red) on a Contact record and it also didn't work.

The weird thing is that I also created a Sharing Rule for Guest User (the one in green) and this works! As a Guest User, I can read all Customer Community Users (contact records) that belong to different Accounts.

Notes:

• A Customer Community User is defined by a Contact record and a User record.
• In my org my Community Users use the Customer Community licenses.
• External User OWD for Contact is private.
• I think Sharing Set is not a solution because it only works to share Contact data within the same Account
• It is worth mentioning that Customer Community Users (Contact data) is displayed on an LWC, the component is feed by a method in an Apex Controller with a SOQL and it's using WITH SHARING.
• The SOQL is not querying the Contact, but another CustomObject that has a lookup with Contact, the SOQL is filtering by Contact: SELECT x FROM CustomObject__c WHERE Contact__r.RecordType.Name = 'myContactRecod'
• If I remove the WHERE part of the query above, I do get the results I expect !

Answer 1

You won't be able to do this with Customer Community licenses. This type can't be assigned to Roles or public groups, so you can't apply sharing rules to these users. You'll need to use Customer Community Plus licenses if you want to apply sharing rules.

Answer 2

I ended up with a work-around:

• I created a formula field in the child object named ContactType__c, the formula displays the parent record type value.
• I changed the query to this:List< CustomObject__c > myrecords = [SELECT ContactType__c FROM CustomObject__c]
• The above query returns all the records, now I need to get the ones I'm interested with:

for(CustomObject__c o : myrecords){
   if(o.ContactType__c == 'x' || o.ContactType__c == 'r'){
      objs.add(o);
   }
}

• It's worth mentioning that I tried to add the filter condition in the WHERE part of the query but it didn't work ! That's why I needed this for loop.

Thanks all for your help!