Calculated Field Failing Against Large List

chewwbutta,

The label on this indicates "workflow", but your description mentions "form", so not sure this will help. When performing queries on a lookup list we've run into issues with items containing special characters (in our case "&"). To resolve this for queries on local lists/libs we enable the the "XML encode inserted tokens" option.

When performing remote queries with the CAML editor, we have to enclose the variable as follows using a Nintex function:

fn-XmlEncode({TextStart}{WorkflowVariable:txtLookupVar}{TextEnd})

Hope this helps.

Gman

Thanks, @gman, I appreciate it! And that's great to know!

To explain the confusion: I have a dynamic form that I'm trying to perform a lookup against a list that has 50k+ items in it. I have tried to use a calculated form field and perform a lookup but my assumption, based on testing, is that because the list exceeds the view threshold it fails. I think tried to think of firing a workflow to query the list and return a true value if a matching item was found, but that also fails due to the list view threshold.

So now I'm really stuck because I can't think of a meaningful way to execute the lookup through either a field or a workflow. 

Does that make sense? Any other tricks up those sleeves? 

Yes, a couple of things. We work with libraries with that many items and more. One solution is to turn up the list view threshold to a value greater than the list contents. This is for on-prem SP2013-19.

Another possibility is to see if you can query the list in its current state using powershell. There is a specific query method using list.GetItemByIdSelectedFields($fileID, "FileLeafRef"); which yielded the fastest response (less than a second) compared to others that were anywhere from 2 - 43 seconds.

Now if Powershell will work for you, the next question is how will this help you in a workflow. Well there is a great third-party Nintex Workflow action by DataOne called PowerActivity action. It provides you with PowerShell extension to Nintex workflow. Together they can do anything. It takes a little to setup, but it allows us to complete 98% of the functionality we need - all from within the workflow structure.

Good luck.