How to quickly delete items from a SharePoint list with Power Automate using the Batch API

How to delete items from a SharePoint list in batches of 1,000 rows by using the SharePoint Batch API method. This method is faster and users fewer API actions than the standard "Delete Item" method available in Power Automate. Grab the code from my blog:
www.tachytelic.net/2021/06/po...
If you found this solution useful, I'd appreciate a donation to the channel:
www.buymeacoffee.com/paulie

[@akashmahajan1775]

I can't thank you enough for the tutorial. Bulk creation and bulk deletion in batches is a game-changer, enabling me to solve my problem and achieve better results. Your generosity in sharing knowledge is truly commendable. Thanks a million!🙌

[@PaulieM]

You're welcome! - it really is useful. Thanks for letting me know it worked well for you.

[@braveheartingux]

The first proper blog about Power Automate, with examples, codes and true knowledge. Amazing. Shared with other and highly recommended.

[@PaulieM]

Thank you!

[@ajssoarestube]

Thanks Paulie, your channel saved me! Here in Brazil we have poor content in our language. God bless you.

[@GuyBerthiaume-ScaleModels]

Worked very well, reducing a 7 minute process to just 1 minute! Thanks!

[@PaulieM]

Great to hear. The speed improvement is great, but just as important is the reduction in API actions. It’s a double win!

[@ajambo2010]

Brilliant, thank you for this Paulie, it worked a treat. The copy and paste into Scope was a gem. I dabbled with POST BATCH but was getting the syntax wrong, it is very touch about spaces and new lines, so it was great to be able to deploy and view working code. The largest batch I have deleted so far has been 11,000 items, I'm working my way up, and it has consistently been 1 min to delete 1,000 items. The next task is to do a mass batch upload, which great timing as you have just released that video.

[@PaulieM]

Really glad you found it useful. If you watch the create items video you’ll find a way to make your delete items action twice as fast. Very easy to do. Good luck on the creates!

[@ajambo2010]

@@PaulieM Hi Where should I add the Threads to the BATCH DELETE Flow? I tried but it is taking just as long. I must be missing something and can't figure it out.. Thanks

[@RowDogSA]

Thanks for this. I am getting 1000 records per minute. A huge improvement from my previous 5 minutes. Now on to your video "to batch create SharePoint List Items".

[@rafaelsantos5332]

Great job Paulie! Thanks for sharing!

[@TrailersYT]

Damn, this is such a good way to delete items! You really helped me a lot! First it took about 90 minutes, and now 17!!

[@PaulieM]

Glad it helped. It really does save a lot of time.

[@ljukcz40]

Amazing tutorial, I'm amazed how people are clever to manage this. Many thanks !

[@PaulieM]

Thank you! Glad it helped!

[@mdhidayat5706]

Thank you so much Paul! Love the batch delete and create videos. It has been a tremendous time saving! Cheers!

[@PaulieM]

Great to hear that’s it’s helped you out. Thank you for the feedback - even better method coming up soon!

[@mdhidayat5706]

I can foresee the new method is going to be insane amazing. 😂 Subscribed!

[@shjohn28]

Thank you so much Paulie for this video. This really helped.

[@PaulieM]

Thanks for the feedback - I’m really pleased it was helpful

[@GordeNN]

Thank you Paulie it really helped me Alot

[@c.mdsalih]

OMG! This is amazing. Saved lot of time and number of requests, Thanks a ton!

[@PaulieM]

You're very welcome!

[@mbhazimangoveni3068]

You Sir are a hero! Great stuff.

[@PaulieM]

Thank you! 🙏

[@Sepialex]

Amazing video and coding skills bro. Thanks, new subscriber and greetings from México.

[@PaulieM]

Thanks for the sub!

[@robertbaker70]

Works great! This was a great learning experience for working with large items!

[@PaulieM]

Glad you found it useful - it’s a neat little addition to the toolbox!

[@robertbaker70]

@@PaulieM Hi Paulie, I was able to take the parts from your “create items threaded version” and apply it in the bulk deleted one on here so I successfully created a threaded solution for Delete in Batch!!! Fantastic Tutorials!!! I was able to delete 1500 items in under a minute verses 3 minutes on the non threaded version.

[@PaulieM]

@@robertbaker70 good work! Sounds like you’ve build a brilliant solution.

[@davidcampling1686]

Awesome Video and Blog. Thx for sharing. I made a mistake of not including the forward slash at the end of my site name which meant the flow ran but didn't delete. You live and learn ! Thx for sharing . I am off to do watch the batch creation!

[@PaulieM]

Easy mistake to make. Glad you got it sorted.

[@juansepowerplatform]

Amazing, thanks

[@TwentyNailsBike]

Terrific, you guy made my day with this solution. Thank you so much for sharing!!

[@PaulieM]

I’m very pleased to hear that! 🙏 😃

[@bertoso]

Obrigado por compartilha, ganhou um inscrito (i am from Brazil)

[@chap666ish]

Well, this is a very handy find, thanks! I have a list with nearly 700,000 items that I need to clear down...

[@PaulieM]

Glad it helped!

[@raisabacelar2664]

Thaaaank yoooouuuuuu

[@EnjoyTheMoment365]

Thanks .....

[@CasparRubin]

insane ♥

[@SeabrookIslander]

So following the directions on the video, I could never see the Delete SharePoint Items pasted code in the clipboard, instead it was giving me the default Power Automate message of available actions that can be copied. If you see this, you need to do a Control-V to successfully paste his code into your flow. This was not obvious from either the video or his blog.

[@aishahodge-jackson6286]

Thank you!!! I ran into this issues and couldn't figure out why

[@TheErmoore]

Thank you. This was driving me crazy.

[@asiafreemen01]

Merci çà fonctionne du 1er coup.

[@NikhilSherigarsherry]

Thank you for this!! Worked like a charm.... however, I am facing this weird issue where the flow takes about 20 mins to delete the items in a Test SP list (10000 items). But the same flow in the main SP list takes more than 40 mins to delete the same set of items. not sure what the issue is? can anyone help? Thanks

[@tungmurom5417]

Thanks you so much!

[@PaulieM]

My pleasure, pleased to hear it helped you out.

[@tungmurom5417]

@@PaulieM Can you do a video tutorial update all items?

[@danielalbers4275]

Hi, Thanks for the video. Looks very good but somehow it also doesn't work for me. I did as described in the video but when deleting around 8000 items in the list, it took over 50minutes. The flow completed succesfully though. Was there a change in the API / flow setup from MS? Any ideas? thx and merry Christmas

[@paddysheeran]

Hi, got this working in a stand alone flow but I'm trying to house it in a child flow so I can send inputs to it with the idea of it being reusable across any other flow I add to the solution. I created a solution and built the child flow within the solution but when trying to save the parent flow after creating the action to run the child flow I keep getting the error message that the child flow can't be used as it's an old flow. Searching around there seems to be an issue with using the clipboard to paste actions into a flow so I'm wondering if the code copy part of the process for building your flow is throwing it out. I just wondered if you had this working as a child flow and what action to take if so. Many thanks for the upload, it's been very helpful so far.

[@manikantarls7656]

Hi sir, I created a flow as you mentioned steps in your video flow is run successfully but list items not deleted and my list has 10000 items plus only

[@davidandrewharvey]

In the Template action in the line that starts DELETE...add a forward slash between the siteAddress and _api

[@awesomeshorts7937]

it now works with this...thanks

[@SeabrookIslander]

Thanks for posting this. The missing "/" was giving me a http 400 error. Works now

[@WonkieDonk]

Is there a way of deleting all data from one specific column?

[@vishwahadagali9499]

@PaulieM - Awesome solution.. this is really helpful one when users want to refresh the list with bulk deletion using batch API. Did you try to trigger this using power app. When I use my power app trigger instead of manual trigger the flow fails at get items. It doesn't show exact error details.. I have gone through your article and comments of the users .. it seems other users also having same issue with power app trigger.. I'll be waiting for your response.. thank you so much.

[@bebin_k5618]

TrackedpropertiesEvaluationFailed I'm getting "response not in JSON format", from get items. Kindly help

[@SiMataR01]

This works great for me deleting around 20k items from a 4.5M item SharePoint List faster! Thank you very much for this, Paul! Can we also use this SharePoint Batch Method in exporting the same 20k or more items to CSV? I am having trouble lately using the Get Items only solution even when the pagination is already set to 5000. My flow was exporting 20k a day before but since the start of December 2023 it has just been exporting just less than 10k.

[@PaulieM]

You don’t need to batch when retrieving items. The standard methods should work fine.

[@SiMataR01]

@@PaulieM Thank you, sir.

[@Rizzipups666]

Great tutorial, thank you Paul! Everything is working well, but has something changed in PowerAutomate or SharePoint? Because it is running correctly, but I'm not saving any time in comparison to the old (Apply to each) function... any ideas? Before it was 12 minutes, now it is also 12 minutes... Edit: I have the same "problem" with your other "Power Automate Flow to batch create SharePoint List Items".. Creation is unfortunately not speeding up

[@PaulieM]

I agree something has changed. But it hasn’t changed for everyone. On some tenants the batch operation is much faster, on others it does seem to have been constrained. I have run the same operation on different tenants and the speeds are wildly different.

[@kritikarawat9596]

I am getting error on step - Get_items : The response is not in a JSON format. Any suggestions? What to do

[@supermanjrz]

how to reduce the number of item to be deleted? i just need to delete a range of list. please help. thanks

[@YouTuberOnline222]

This is amazing. Thanks for sharing it, Paul. However, when I tried to use it to delete 1300 items from a SharePoint list, the action "Send_an_HTTP_request_to_SharePoint" errored out with message saying "The current change set contains too many operations. A maximum number of '1000' operations are allowed in a change set." Is there a way to avoid or increase the 1000 limit?

[@PaulieM]

1000 is the maximum number of actions that can be completed in one batch request. You can easily control this by setting the maximum number of results from the "Get Items" action to 1,000. I prefer to use a lower number such as 750 to give some margin.

[@tatiahk]

Not sure if something has fundamentally changed with power automate that has affected your code, but when I ran this, the flow appears to be deleting items at 135 Items per minute. So it'd take 13 hours to delete list with 112000 items.

[@PaulieM]

I noticed that myself the other day. Maybe SharePoint throttling has changed.

[@viplavism]

don't know why it still is unable to delete 1 item

[@vazchi]

For some reason this did not work for me. The flow runs without any issue, but nothing from the list gets deleted :(

[@AYUSHGUPTA-pi1ib]

me also facing same issue

[@JesusJimenezALJP]

@@AYUSHGUPTA-pi1ib same U_U

[@AYUSHGUPTA-pi1ib]

Sorry..it worked for me...I was not providing the correct internal name for the list

[@zanrleonardo]

Me too...got this:: --batchresponse_fe7f85a1-d115-42d2-82bb-59cbe67ca499 Content-Type: application/http Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request CONTENT-TYPE: application/json;odata=verbose;charset=utf-8 {"error":{"code":"-1, Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.InvalidClientQueryException","message":{"lang":"en-US","value":"Invalid request."}}} --batchresponse_fe7f85a1-d115-42d2-82bb-59cbe67ca499 Content-Type: application/http Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request CONTENT-TYPE: application/json;odata=verbose;charset=utf-8 {"error":{"code":"-1, Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.InvalidClientQueryException","message":{"lang":"en-US","value":"Invalid request."}}} --batchresponse_fe7f85a1-d115-42d2-82bb-59cbe67ca499 Content-Type: application/http Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary why?

[@adamsmith4258]

Hey Paulie! Would you happen to know why I can't paste the code? Once copied it does not show up under My Clipboard. I'm using the online version, not Desktop. Thanks!

[@adamsmith4258]

Are you aware of a way to enter that data manually if we're unable to use the My Clipboard function?

[@PaulieM]

Have you tried pressing CTRL-V when you’re in the clipboard?

[@adamsmith4258]

@@PaulieM I did, indeed. The same thing was happening on your batch create page. The code would not copy and paste. I ended up downloading your example file and importing, copying and pasting from within PA. That seemed to work

[@ninostrothoff6443]

If there is an "ä" "ü" "ö" in the Listename the Flow does not work

[@PaulieM]

It will, but you will have to correctly encode those characters so the lost name matches up.

[@craiglee3625]

This didn't work for me - I keep getting an error in the Send HTTP Request - Action Send_An_Http_Request_to_Sharepoint failed. Resource not found

[@morpheus9869]

same issue here

[@TrailersYT]

ever figured this out? or a faster way that does work?

[@YonPengus]

Check the Send HTTP Request Action - mine had blanked out the site address. Works now after adding back in.