Unable to query list getting Field 'Title' cannot be referenced

Question

Unable to filter any list on a Sharepoint site I'm getting the following error I have tried setting the headers but no difference and the lists are filtered.

Field 'Title' cannot be referenced in filter or orderby as it is not indexed. Provide the 'Prefer: HonorNonIndexedQueriesWarningMayFailRandomly' header to allow this, but be warned that such queries may fail on large lists.

Answer 1

Hi @McCarthy Chris,

It seems that you are having trouble filtering a SharePoint list that has more than 5,000 items. This is a common issue that occurs when the list exceeds the list view threshold limit. To fix this, you need to do two things:

First, you need to create an indexed column for the field that you want to filter by. For example, if you want to filter by Title, you need to create an index for the Title column. You can do this by going to List settings > Columns > Title > Create an index. Note that the list limit to add or remove an indexed column is 20,000 items.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/troubleshoot/lists-and-libraries/fails-filtering-sharepoint-column

Second, you need to modify your view to use the indexed column and filtering to reduce the number of items displayed in the view to 5,000 or less. You can do this by going to List settings > Views > Your view > Filter. For example, you can filter by Title is equal to some value or Title begins with some letter.

If you still get the error after doing these steps, you may need to reindex your list to refresh the index data. You can do this by going to List settings > Advanced settings > Reindex List. This may take some time depending on the size of your list.

Here are some links for your reference:

https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/284172/sharepoint-online-filter-by-not-showing-all-available-options

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49169917/microsoft-graph-honornonindexedquerieswarningmayfailrandomly-error-when-filterin

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Best Regards

Cheng Feng