PowerShell: Batch Process Large Lists to Fix “The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator.” Error in SharePoint
Problem: When you are working with large lists > 5000 list items, any operation such as: Read/update/delete is controlled by the list view threshold. You get an error message when you try to handle large list items: The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator.
Solution: Batch Process Large List Items
You can always Increase the List View Threshold and other throttling settings in the SharePoint Central Administration site, Here is how you can batch process list items to mitigate this issue:
This Script would end-up in list view threshold error:
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
#Set config variables
$WebURL="http://intranet.crescent.com"
$ListName ="LargeList"
#Get Web and List Objects
$Web = Get-SPWeb $WebURL
$List = $Web.Lists[$ListName]
$ListItems = $List.Items
ForEach($Item in $ListItems)
{
Write-host "Processing List Item:"$Item.id
}
and this one works by batch processing:
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
#Set config variables
$WebURL="http://intranet.crescent.com"
$ListName ="LargeList"
#Get Web and Objects
$Web = Get-SPWeb $WebURL
$List = $Web.Lists[$ListName]
#Query to batch process
$Query = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPQuery
$Query.ViewAttributes = "Scope='Recursive'"
$Query.RowLimit = "2000"
Do {
#Get List Items defined by the Query
$ListItems = $List.GetItems($Query)
$Query.ListItemCollectionPosition = $ListItems.ListItemCollectionPosition
#Loop through each list Item
ForEach($Item in $ListItems)
{
Write-Host "Processing List Item:" $Item.Id
#$List.GetItemById($Item.Id).delete()
}
} While ($Query.ListItemCollectionPosition -ne $Null)
Here is my another post for SharePoint Online to handle large lists without getting threshold exceeded error: SharePoint Online: How to Handle Large Lists in PowerShell?
