Solve 5000 item SharePoint list limit

[Noah]

The triggers on SharePoint lists (e.g. "When item is updated") stop working when the list contains more than 5000 items. In the immediate term, there should be a clear warning about this fact in the description.

But this is a blocker to using Flow with any SharePoint list of significance, and always a risk. Please make these triggers work reliably regardless of list size.

Perhaps this can be avoided by implementing the triggers through webhooks rather than queries:

https://dev.office.com/blogs/sharepoint-webhooks-is-now-generally-available-build-service-oriented-p...

[Laurence73]

Flow is basically unusable with SharePoint Lists because of this blocker. How can you guarantee that as time goes by a Client list for example does not surpass 5000 items? This is a ticking timebomb - surely this cannot be part of a well thought out architecture?

[lebshiff21]

Had a SP List and Flow working perfectly only to discover that after the list hit the magical 5000 number, everything in Flow stopped working... FRUSTRATING

[aliqanber1]

Make an Archive list and move items of less importance to it using a flow with schedule trigger. Then your list should have less than 5000 items. i.e. only keep your most needed items, and archive others. 

[Megasween]

I have hundreds of hours into developing an application that is utilizing Flow. I am going to take a couple of days off and figure out how I re-architect my entire solution.  This really needs to be both advertised and solved, at a minimum this should be clearly stated on your limits page (statements like flow SharePoint connectors do not work on lists of over 5000 items is needed, I would have taken a totally different approach months ago.

I get not being able to pull more than 5000 items at a time, but broken triggers, and being unable to delete items is really unexpected. 

Please stop adding candy to flow and get this core functionality working so we can actually use it with SharePoint. 

[TWolsten]

Any word on changes to this limit? I am wondering if I will need to separate my database into 3 separate lists because of this limitation.

[ohthreesixfive]

*Posted this as a response elsewhere to a question, but putting it here in case someone stumbles onto this idea and finds it useful.

Hi everyone,

I ran into this very issue recently after having gone live with a new document library to store a large number of files that were being hosted on a different (and costly) cloud platform. Of course, during testing the Flow was working great (picking up newly created and modified files) - but as soon as I brought everything over (73k+ files in total) and 'turned the lights on' the trigger would no longer trigger!

Anyways, I was able to resolve it by turning on indexing on the 'Modified' column. Since I hadn't seen this documented anywhere (and I did a lot of searching), I went ahead and created a post to walk you through the process in case you need more detailed guidance. Here's the link:

https://www.ohthreesixtyfive.org/2018/03/microsoft-flow-overcoming-the-list-view-threshold.html

Of course, if you have exceeded 20k items you'll need to trim it below that to be able to turn on indexing, but otherwise (Update: The 20k item limit to turn on indexing has, mercifully, been lifted! You can proceed to turn on indexing without needing to trim back your content now.) it should be pretty painless. Let me know how it goes!

Best regards,

Ramiro

[Megasween]

ohthreesixfive you fix is awsome.  Have you tried to see if Delete Item works after you add in the modified column? I dont have a list that exceed to try it back out, but I converted all my flows to use the Rest API to delete just to be safe. 

[ohthreesixfive]

Hi @Megasween,

I only have a Document Library to work with at the moment that's exceeded the limit (the one mentioned above) - so I could only use the 'Delete file' action (but it should be functionally the same as the 'Delete item' in a list action).

I went ahead and added it to the Flow to test it, here's the parameters:

Site Address - Current location of large library

File Identifier - 'Identifier' dynamic content from 'When an item is created or modified' trigger

The Flow triggered as soon as I added the file, and after going through some conditional checks, successfully deleted that same file using the 'Delete file' action.

Let me know if that answers your question!

Best regards,

Ramiro

[Johann_CHARB]

Good idea ! We can't do good things with powerapps deleguation, so lot of operate are doing by Flow. Flow should work with huge list !