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Removal of large number empty folders from a Sharepoint Document library

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Posted on by Sidhant_02

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Hello everyone,
Few days back I got a requirement wherein I had to delete all the empty folders present inside a Document library in a SharePoint list. For which I created a cloud based flow (manual triggered) to achieve the required. The flow looked as follows:

So this worked fine when I tested it in my quality setup.

But the actual issue was due to some issue (there was another application through which they were creating folders based on projects and there were some issues in the folder logic i.e. it got stuck in infinite loop which led to creation of large number of empty folders like 1 crore/10 million) and when they tried to execute this flow it got failed.
It gave 502 Error (Bad gateway error). So is it because of the high number of records?.

If so in such case (high number of records i.e. empty folders to be deleted is there any way to do it, if so could you please help me with it. As I have never dealt with such huge number of records till now.

Regards,
Sidhant

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Building flows

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Damin 63 on at

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Hi, for me I have two ways to achieve what you are looking for :
First, whether you create a reccuring flow that calls a child one which will delete only top-500 folder each time it gets called, ok.
Second is to create a flow that call a runbook to executes a powershell script on azure automation, and this script deletes all the folder you'd like.
Hope this could help you.

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Sidhant_02 986 on at

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Hi @Damin ,
Will it be possible to demonstrate with an example the two methods that you just mentioned.
As I just got to know there are around 10,500 empty folders in the SharePoint document library

Regards,
Sidhant.

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Sidhant_02 986 on at

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Hi @Damin ,
I have created a new flow that is able to retrieve records and deletes 100 empty folders at a time. So I did try to increase the limit (threshold limit) but the loop only ran 100 times:

Any updates so that I can delete all empty folders in a single run or if not possible then what is the other way.

Regards,
Sidhant.

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Damin 63 on at

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Hi, First of all, you'll need the sharepoint site id, and here is how to get it https://companyname.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename/_api/site/id

Then you need to register an application and give it Graph API application permissions, to do that you need to go to https://entra.microsoft.com/
once the app registered and the graph api permission (Files.ReadWrite.All) given to it:
Note Client Id, Tenant Id, and create Secret Key for the application.
Now the flow
To Get All Folders in Document Library (of course you can choose the library you want, root==Document Library)
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0//sites/{siteId}/drive/root/children
Then filtering the http response body :
Then deleting each item of the filtered array.

I hope this could help.

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