Exceeding List View Threshold in Sharepoint Online

[Ted McLaughlin]

We are in the process of migrating SP on prem to the cloud, and we have a couple Finance libraries that we are moving that are in the 100k to 1.5million range.  Needless to say, that violates the 5,000 list view threshold.

What I can't understand is that on prem we have 10,000 set as the list view threshold, and I'm able to easily get into those libraries and click next, next, next, to page through each set of the 30 items that get brought back by the view.  For some reason that doesn't work in SPO.  I have the views set up exactly the same in SPO that we had on prem, but in SPO I just get the list view error and it won't show me any data.

I've looked at this page:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-large-lists-and-libraries-in-sharepoint-b8588dae-938...

And this one:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/edit-a-list-view-in-sharepoint-online-15916903-e79a-423f-b4...

But neither of them help.  I'm not trying to display 25k items at once, I just want to bring back 30 at a time and that's it.

[#2]

Hi @Ted McLaughlin - unfortunately in SPO, even if you're only viewing 30 at a time, there can't be more than 5k in any view. That means filtering out older data, adding more folders or finding a way to categorize with metadata columns. And even if your main view is under 5k, if you have other views in the same list/library that will return more than 5k, the view will break.

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@Ted McLaughlin wrote:

We are in the process of migrating SP on prem to the cloud, and we have a couple Finance libraries that we are moving that are in the 100k to 1.5million range.  Needless to say, that violates the 5,000 list view threshold.

What I can't understand is that on prem we have 10,000 set as the list view threshold, and I'm able to easily get into those libraries and click next, next, next, to page through each set of the 30 items that get brought back by the view.  For some reason that doesn't work in SPO.  I have the views set up exactly the same in SPO that we had on prem, but in SPO I just get the list view error and it won't show me any data.

I've looked at this page:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-large-lists-and-libraries-in-sharepoint-b8588dae-938...

And this one:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/edit-a-list-view-in-sharepoint-online-15916903-e79a-423f-b4...

But neither of them help.  I'm not trying to display 25k items at once, I just want to bring back 30 at a time and that's it.

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[#3]

@Kelly_Edinger 

Any suggestions on what I can do with a library that has 1.5 million items, (invoices), that are broken out by year, month, day that the invoice was scanned in.  We have a folder off the root of the library for 2015, then a 01 month sub folder, than a subfolder 05 for the day. That day might have 50 invoices that got scanned that day.

There is no metadata on these items other than the basic title, last modified date & user, etc.  I have nothing other than that to filter on.

I don't know of any way I could add any metadata to a library like this, nor any way that I could re-arrange the data.  Especially now that all this data is in the cloud and I can't really access it.  I admit I haven't tried to do anything with powershell against this library because i can't figure out anything to do.

Thanks for your help with this.

[#4]

@Ted McLaughlin , you can bypass the broken views by going to Site Contents and then Library settings and for each view that has been created, filter out files that were created before [X] date. That should 'unbreak' your ability to view and work with the files. (that's assuming that the migration tool that was used did not alter the original created dates).

You may need to create filtered views for each month to get under the view threshold. Which does not sound like fun. Would love to hear from someone else in the community if they have any ideas.

[#5]

It is possible to have a large number of items in a view as long as the columns you are sitting by are indexed. I did this by creating the list, columns and indexes first and then migrate the data in, if you try to add an index after you have more than 5000 items it might not work. The Title column isn't always indexed either so it that would be a cause of your issue even though you have folders. Always keep the number of items to blocks of 100 for browser performance as it will fetch 100 at a time as you scroll.

[#6]

@Ted McLaughlin 
The easiest way forward is to use Alan's approach to create the indexes prior to migrating the content.

An alternative approach is to use solutions that cater for the List View Threshold in SharePoint Online. See https://directory.collab365.community/office365-sharepoint/best-document-management-tools-for-sharep...
There are also browser-based tools that mimic "File Explorer", e.g. SLIM Companion Explorer.
Paul

[#7]

Please create index on created and modified field before using them in the view filters