Forum Discussion

Francis Laurin's avatar
Francis Laurin
Brass Contributor
Dec 09, 2022

LVT suddenly more picky: several views suddenly not working anymore

Hi,

 

I have a client that has ~40k documents in a document library and this has been the case for years. Suddenly, two days ago, several flat views just stopped working with the dreaded "The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold" error message. I deleted 5k test documents to see if some sort of hidden threshold had been hit, but this didn't change anything. 

 

Something changed in the infrastructure, I believe. I also try to create routine views on other libraries with more than 5000 documents that always worked and don't anymore.

 

I don't really want to go through the details of each affected views and the possible work arounds, but does anyone know if something changed lately in the SPO infrastructure about the LVT?

  • More precisely, this looks to affect views that sort (or group by) on text or managed metadata columns.
  • shawncklsmartin's avatar
    shawncklsmartin
    Copper Contributor

    Francis Laurin , I am having the same issue. Has anyone found a way to manage this? The List View is important to the users managing this Library. Having less than 5000 items is not an option in this case. 

    • Francis Laurin's avatar
      Francis Laurin
      Brass Contributor

      shawncklsmartin

      Good to see that I am not alone, but I got no help or acknowledgement from Microsoft support. They won't touch anything with more than 5000 items. Support don't understand it themselves.

      What I find is that the issue only happens on flat views on a library with document sets. This may explain why it is a niche case and not enough seem to experiment the issue. 

  • Would it be possible to differentiate the documents into multiple content types? Have you tried to index certain columns and limit the view?

    I would gladly try to help through a MS Teams meeting if interested.
    • shawncklsmartin's avatar
      shawncklsmartin
      Copper Contributor

      Hi ArefHalmstrand! Thanks so much for reaching out. I have not considered separate content types. I have tried to limit views and index columns. I would be interested in a MS Teams call if you have the time. Please private message me for contact details. 

      Cc Francis Laurin , thanks for your reply yesterday. I appreciate your follow up. 

    • Francis Laurin's avatar
      Francis Laurin
      Brass Contributor
      In my case, I have content types for documents and document sets, my index are properly set up and my views only filter and sort through the indexed columns. I showed it all to Marc Anderson and he confirmed the issue but was not able to get the attention of Microsoft with it. You are very welcome to take a look. I have several setup like this at different clients: One doc lib with doc sets and flat views on documents that don't work anymore.
      • ArefHalmstrand's avatar
        ArefHalmstrand
        Steel Contributor
        I spoke to Shawn recently. My recommendation is to separate the data into multiple document libraries. If you still want to access them all from a single view, it is doable by either create a page with short links to the different document libraries. Or you could include them in the same library, by adding them as a shortcut link.

        The advantage of having multiple document libraries is that you could actually handle them in a more complex way. Exclude some of them from search, set specific retention policies or even hide certain document libraries from end-users.