Gallery limitations

[karl_oliverio]

Is there a limitation on how many records can be displayed by a gallery? My datasource is a document library and I am expecting thousands of documents to be stored there. Is there any alternatives or solution to display such amount of data on gallery?

[Pstork1]

There isn't really a limit imposed by the gallery, but there is a limit on how many items you can retrieve at a time.  The default is 500 and the maximum is 2,000.  Normally you will need to filter the data source in some way to keep the items displayed in the gallery below those limits.

[karl_oliverio]

Hi @Pstork1 ~ thank you for your response. But for example I have a 50,000 items from my data source that needs to be displayed on that gallery, how do i handle such amount of items? Also, I am thinking, will pagination be a solution to this? If so, do you have any useful article there that I can check?

[Pstork1]

Pagination is one solution to the problem, but that essentially does what I mentioned in my previous response.  If you filter the list on an ID column soemthing like this Filter(datasource id >= minID && ID <= MaxID) where MinID and MaxID are variables that contain a sliding set of values per page 0,500 - first page; 501,1000 second page, etc. But there is no support in PowerApps for automatic pagination. So you need to design and build it yourself.  Again, you can't retrieve more than 500 to 2,000 records at any one time. You can get the first 500 and then the next 500 etc.

Another common response is to copy the list in batches to a local collection since collections aren't limited in the same way. But there are limits on how much data can be stored locally so I suspect you will still run out of room before you can cache everything you want to display.

The bottom line is that a gallery just isn't designed to display a list of 50,000 items.  But honestly, what user would actually scroll through a list that big anyway.

[karl_oliverio]

Actually we are trying to create a Document Library UI made out of PowerApps and we are using the Sharepoint Doc Library as its backend. Our company has a roughly 50k released documents and we need to have it all available when we create it on PowerApps.

[Pstork1]

SharePoint Views also can't show 50,000 items at a time in the regular document library.  The solution for both SharePoint and PowerApps is to provide filtered views that limit the number of items displayed to less than the number of items allowed. You will need to find some way to provide user selectable filters that limit the display of your 50,000 files to a more reasonable number.  There is no other real option.

[karl_oliverio]

If I add a filter fields for the gallery, will it return items from the data source entirely? or will it return only items from the first 500?

[Pstork1 · Accepted solution]

Take a look at this article on Delegation in SharePoint.

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/powerapps-update-large-sharepoint-lists-startswith-delega...

As long as the selection criteria for your gallery use delegable functions to get the number of items returned below the maximum then it will run against the entire list.  The key is that delegable functions do the selection of records on the server not the client.

[karl_oliverio]

Hi @Pstork1 ~ thank you for your confirmation. I will take it from here then. 

[RezaDorrani]

Hi @karl_oliverio 

The delegation limits specified by @Pstork1  will holds true for PowerApps

However, since you are using SharePoint

SharePoint queries fail to retrieve items beyond 5k items if the columns being queried are not indexed

Hence you would have to make sure that you create column indexes in SharePoint if you know your documents will exceed 5k

Also , note that once your library or list exceeds 20k items, you will not be able to add/delete indexes

Hence plan before hand if you are sure you will exceed the different limits

500 - PowerApps delegation limit (can be increased to max 2k)

5000 - SharePoint query limit

20000 - limit after which indexes cannot be created/deleted

Regards,

Reza Dorrani

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