Count list items in Power Automate Flow

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

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!

Categories:

Building flows

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Pstork1 69,110 Most Valuable Professional on at

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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.

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Paulie78 8,422 Moderator on at

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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 😘

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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

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AJ007 10 on at

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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?

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Paulie78 8,422 Moderator on at

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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.

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Tanveer Ahmed S 2 on at

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To count the number of items in a SharePoint list using Power Automate Flow, just follow the below TWO steps:

Add a SharePoint HTTP Request Action:

Configure the Action:

Site Address: Select the appropriate SharePoint site.

API Endpoint: Use
/_api/web/lists/getbytitle('<List Title>')/ItemCount
.

Add a Compose Action:

Configure the Compose Action:

In the Inputs field, use the following expression to extract the item count:
body('Send_an_HTTP_request_to_SharePoint')?['d/ItemCount']

You can either you use a variable or compose action to use this value anywhere in the flow.

This approach efficiently retrieves the item count, even if the list exceeds the threshold limit, and works for both lists and libraries.

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