Permanently delete items in a SharePoint list

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Posted on by BCBuizer

22,505 Super User 2025 Season 2

Hi Everybody,

As a requirement for a solution all data older than a year needs to be permanently deleted on a monthly basis, at the beginning of the month for the previous month. The data source is a SharePoint list and there's possibility of having more than 5000 items per month.

The solution I got working so far is a scheduled cloud flow that uses threads to retrieve the items older than a year (to deal with the possibility of having over 5000 items) and then deletes them permanently:

To get the items

And then to delete them:

union(
outputs('Send_an_HTTP_request_to_SharePoint_-_Get_items_older_than_a_year')[0]['body']['value'],
outputs('Send_an_HTTP_request_to_SharePoint_-_Get_items_older_than_a_year')[1]['body']['value']
)

However, it seems like an extra step to first get the items and then delete them. I believe there must be a way to delete these items directly, but unfortunately my attempts to get "merge" the two HTTP requests have not yet been successful.

Can anybody support me in finding the way to getting this to work?

Categories:

Building flows

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lbendlin 8,474 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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If you knew all the IDs of the files you want deleted then you wouldn't need the GET request. But your process requires you to run one GET query and then iterate through the results with the DELETE query.

Not sure what the UNION is supposed to achieve but the rest looks reasonable. I would guess it might be rather slow though.

Have you considered using the native SharePoint data retention policy instead?

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BCBuizer 22,505 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @lbendlin ,

The point of the HTTP GET is to get the IDs I need to delete, but I figured I should be able to "nest" this somehow in the Uri for the HTTP DELETE. In all this takes a few minutes to run, so it's not the slowest method in the world, but whatever optimisation is possible, I'm interested.

I'll have a look at the retention policy.

Ps. The purpose of the UNION is to join the outputs of the two threads (both 2500+ items).

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David_MA 12,966 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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The simplest solution would be to set up a retention policy on the list based on the Created date.

You would find this in the list settings under Information management policy settings. If this is not listed in the list settings, you will first need to go to your site settings. Under Site Collection Features, turn on In Place Records Management.

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