2016-11-12

The silent 2000 limit

Last week we hit the silent 2000 limit in SharePoint, this limit cuts off pull down menus after 2000 items, this bugger is really nasty because SharePoint does not warn you in anyway it just removes trailing entries. “I cannot find the entries I want in the GAC pulldown”. “Well you should there are not SP super many GACs (more than 5000), just SP extremly many (more than 2000) and that Sharepoint can handle”, sluggish yes, but it can handle more than 2000 items. “Show me my ‘UB40’ then”. Of course ‘UB40’ was missing, after a very, very long while I found the silent 2000 limit in Sharepoint, and ‘UB40’ was one of the last in a 2683 items long list of GACs and thus just cut off.
This time I did not try to find another solution I just replaced the pulldown with a simple text field. Of course I had to copy all the GAC values from the old pulldown to the new text field. Noone I had close at hand could help me with a ‘copy script’ so I had to copy the hard way copy’n’paste. (I can probably knock together a field copy Powershell Script, but I have not done this before and was in a hurry, and a bit upset about this 2000 limit ‘feature’.) Anyway it took me almost a day and I got a lateral epicondylitis. If you copy more than a SP many (a few) fields, SharePoint gets stressed and cannot communicate with the SharePoint server:
 
First you go into List Quick Edit mode:

Then you copy’n’paste SP reasonable amount (very few) items, then you stop edit (save), then you go into List Quick Edit again, scroll down to where you left and copy’n’paste a SP reasonable chunk, and stop edit… until you have processed this entire SP super large (more than 5000 items) list.

SharePoint is great for setting up simple collaboration web sites, but not for an application storing reference data. This I have learned the hard way.

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