Convenient delete a single document from large list

SharePoint Lists and Libraries can store large amounts of (document) items. This does complicate the management of the stored items: before you can edit or delete the item, you need to find it in the large list storage. As result of the listview threshold max 5000 items are displayed, and you will therefore likely spend a lot of time navigating page-wise through the list/library before you eventually find the item you want to manage. When it concerns a regular list, you can automate this item-search via "search in 'this list'" (<site-url>/_layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx?cs=This%20List&u=<list-url>); however for managing document items this does not help: the searchresult does not display the document library ribbon, and thus you cannot activate for instance the 'Delete Document' action. But the SharePoint toolbox has more to offer: setup an interactive listview search experience by combining it with a connected TextFilter webpart. For the how-to I refer to Connect a Filter Web Part to a List View Web Part on a classic page.

Screen impression of the convenience result:

Retrieve data from a large list via REST

The infamous ´5000´ listview threshold, we all have encountered that limit at least once in utilizing SharePoint as data backend. This time I was consulted by a business user that utilized SharePoint´s data management capabilities for storage of above 135,000 listitems. Wrt storage this amount is not an issue, but for retrieving it can be due the listview threshold. The advised approach to deal with that is via indexed columns, and tabbed/indexed views. That is for retrieving + viewing the big amount of listitems in the standard SharePoint UI. But what about requesting the data via SharePoint REST service? The REST protocol promises to support a similar navigation/tabbed experience via $top and $skip parameters. However, here SharePoint (2010) demonstrates to be not a fully compliant REST citizen. The $top parameters works fine on indexed large list, but usage of $skip results in an HTTP 500; and in ULS the error "Throttled:Big list slow query. List item query elapsed time: 0 milliseconds" is logged.

Also here it turns out that the '5000 threshold' is such a common encountered SharePoint issue. Internet search within a few hits leads to the helpful Stackoverflow resource: SharePoint 2010 REST top, skip fails on large list:

$skip query option is not supported, but $top is. Workaround, use a mix of $orderby on ID, $filter on ID and $top x items, and loop

Pseudo-code to loop through the entire big SharePoint List:

var nextId = 0;
WHILE TRUE DO
    var getData = $.getJson(“<site-collection url>/_vti_bin/listdata.svc/LargeList"
          + "?$select=Id,Name&$top=1000&&orderby=id&$filter=Id gt " + nextId);
    if (getData is not empty) {
        nextId = getData(last)[id];
    } else {
        break;
    }
END DO