Count list items in Power Automate Flow

[Anonymous]

Dear community,

I have created a flow which:

• get elements from a SharePoint list 
  • filter the elements based on ODATA
• -select the results 

The results are in the following format: 

[

  {

    "ID": "A"

  },

  {

    "ID": "A"

  },

  {

    "ID": "B"

  },

  {

    "ID": "A"

  },

]

Without "Apply to each" I would like to find a quicker method to count unique elements and the results, sort descendant and to show the results in the following form:

A - 3

B - 1 

Does anybody have any idea if this is doable in PowerAutomate? Tried different methods w/o success.

Thanks! 

[Pstork1]

There is no simple way to do this, but it can be done without using an Apply to Each.  

1) Do a Filter Array action for each value you want to count.

2) Use Length() on the resulting array. That will give you a count for that value.

repeat process for each distinct value.

[Paulie78 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

I've done a video for you that demonstrates a high performance way of counting the distinct items in an array, without having to use a filter action or any apply to each loops. Check it out:

How to count the number of Distinct Items in an Array in Power Automate

Hope this helps.

Blog: tachytelic.net

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/PaulieM/videos

If I answered your question, please accept it as a solution 😘

[Anonymous]

@Paulie78  - SUPER THANKS! It works great, and saves a lot of time. 

[AJ007]

Hi Paulie,

Brilliant thanks for this and good timing. I do need to do a mass delete of records in the Teams Table. Unfortunately our IT have locked access to the HTTP action.

So I was going to leverage an earlier solution of your which uses Threads. I was going to run the Threads concurrently and the first thread would process rows 1 - 5000, the second thread 5001 - 1000 as so one. Within each thread there would be the 'apply to each' to 'delete row', which again would run concurrently maxing out a 50.

My issue is that I do not know how to select rows  1 - 5000, 5001 - 1000 etc of a Teams Table. With a SharePoint list I can use the ID column. In the Teams Table I have created an AutoNumber column but this is saved as a text. I'm guessing a solution might involve Fetch XML Query in the List Rows action?

Appreciate any suggestion?

[Paulie78]

HI @AJ007 - I don't think I would bother with the threaded method for your use case. Why not just use one apply to each with the concurrency set to the maximum - it would be a much more simplistic flow.