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Delete Only Select Items from a SharePoint List

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Hello, I want to delete some items from a SharePoint list. The list has thousands of items in it. I have seen many videos and tutorials that show how to bulk delete using PA, but these methods delete ALL list items. I only wish to delete certain list items using their ID's as keys. Which tools can I use to accomplish this? I am very new to PA. Thank you!

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tom_riha 10,185 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hello @Anonymous ,

I guess all the articles start with 'Get items' where it gets all the items and then deletes them. To delete only some of them add a filter in the 'Filter Query' field, that way you can get only some of the items and remove them.

<column internal name> <operator> <value>

For example, if you want only item with specific ID you can use the filter as below.

ID eq 1

It'll return only the items that fit the filter, in this case only the item with the specific ID.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Hello Tom, thank you for showing me the filter option. I was wondering however, if I have a large list of ID's already, how can I filter them out from the list using the filter query? For example,

ID
234908234
148728957
887348384
483748782
242344443

I want to pull these items from my list and delete only these from the list. I can't seem to figure out any formulas.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Continuing off my previous reply, here is something I have found:
As you can see, I am entering these values individually, but I want to enter a whole bunch in the "Project Number" category at once so that I dont have to keep typing them in.

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grantjenkins 11,063 Moderator on at

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@Anonymous Where are you getting the list of IDs from that you want to delete? Are those IDs within an Excel Table, SharePoint List, etc.?

You would be looking to use a Filter array instead of a Select here. I can build a sample flow for you, but just wondering where the IDs come from initially.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Hi @grantjenkins , the ID's come from an excel file and would match a field called "Project Number" in the SharePoint list. There are about 30 of them in the file, and I want to delete only the items with these project numbers in the SP list.

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grantjenkins 11,063 Moderator on at

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@Anonymous Ok I’ll provide a solution for you when I get up - already built most of it. Just off to sleep now (12:40AM where I am at the moment)

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Sounds good Grant, thank you so much for your help. I've tried searching and playing around with different tools/connectors but have had no luck. The solution you build will be extremely helpful.

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grantjenkins 11,063 Moderator on at

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Hopefully this will help with what you're looking for.

For this example, I've used the following SharePoint List. It has a Title and a Single line of text column called Account Number.

And the following Excel Table that contains the Account Numbers that I want to delete from my List.

See full flow below. I'll go into each of the actions.

I'm not sure what your trigger is, but I've just used Manual trigger a flow.

List rows present in a table retrieves the data from the Excel Table (the Account Numbers that we want to delete).

Select will extract out just the Account Numbers into an array. Note that Map is set to Text mode (See screenshot).

Get items will retrieve all the items from our List.

IMPORTANT - You mentioned that you had thousands of items. By default, Get items will only return the first 100 items. To cater for more, we need to go into Settings, turn on Pagination, and set the Threshold to a number greater than the number of items in your List.

Filter array uses the output (value) from Get items, and for the condition, checks if the output of our Select (array of Account Numbers) contains the Account Number for each item. This will give us an array of all the List items that need to be deleted.

IMPORTANT - At this point, you should save and run your flow to ensure it's returning the expected items in the Filter array (only items that need to be deleted).

Once you've validated the output you can move on to the following.

Apply to each will iterate over each of the items in our Filter array (the items that need to be deleted). And within the Apply to each we have a Delete item that will delete each of the items. The expression used for the ID is:
item()?['ID']

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Hi Grant,

First off, thank you so much for this detailed reply. I don't think I would've figured this out alone.

I am having trouble with a couple of actions. The first is the list row action:
As you can see, no table appears in the dropdown and so I can't select anything. I am able to enter "Table1" manually and it seems to allow that.

After this, I am having trouble with the Select action: I am looking for "Project Number" but I'm guessing that since no Table appeared in the dropdown earlier, it won't show up here. What should I do?
I have the excel file in a Sharepoint site in a document library similar to yours.

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grantjenkins 11,063 Moderator on at

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Is your Excel data setup as a Table?

If not, then you'd need to format it as a Table before you can use List rows present in a table to extract the data.

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