A wise man recently asked me how I’d go about retrieving the five most recent modified items from every list in a farm. Fun question and there are a couple ways of going about this, but here is what I came up with.

Things to note: 1) on prem farm with more than one web app. 2) if you are dealing with a large farm, I’d suggest chunking out the Get-SPSite -limit all and the $site.allwebs into to smaller data sets. 3) script needs comments and error handling or reporting

Clear-Host

if ($null -eq (Get-PSSnapin -Name Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)) {
    Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
}

$sites = Get-SPWebApplication | Get-SPSite -limit all 

foreach ($site in $sites) {
    foreach ($web in $site.AllWebs) {
        $lists = $web.Lists
        foreach ($list in $lists) {
            $query = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPQuery 
            $query.Query =  
            "<Query>
                <OrderBy>
                  <FieldRef Name='Modified' Ascending='False' />
                </OrderBy>
            </Query>" 
            $query.RowLimit = 5
            $listItems = $list.GetItems($query)
            
            if ($listItems) {
                foreach ($lIem in $listItems) {
                    Write-Host "Web: $web -- List: $list -- Item: $($lIem.Name) "
                }
            }
        }
        if ($web) {
            $web.Dispose()
        }
    }
}

From my desktop, I wanted to delete all the items in a list. The list had 10,000+ item and loop through the items one at a time is slow and not efficient. This is where batch process comes in and will help to quickly delete all the items in a large list.

In this example, I commented out the SharePoint Online Credentials because I’m working with on on-prem environment.
The batch size is set to 1,000

}
Catch {
write-host -f Red "Error Adding Items to List!" $_.Exception.Message
}


Limiting the number of rows returned in each query will help to avoid this error:

Exception calling "ExecuteQuery" with "0" argument(s): "The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator."


Some of the scripts was borrowed from:
http://www.sharepointdiary.com/2016/12/sharepoint-online-get-all-items-from-large-lists-powershell-csom.html

Note:
I plan to revisit this and batch processing where you combine all the delete statements into a large XML string and pass it to SharePoint for processing.

Trying to setup my dev environment to play around with SPFx and ran into this error:

[08:33:19] Error - [trust-cert] Error: root "Trusted Root Certification Authorities"
Signature matches Public Key
CertUtil: -addstore command FAILED: 0x80070005 (WIN32: 5 ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED)
CertUtil: Access is denied.

[08:33:19] Error – [trust-cert] Certificate trust failed with an unknown error.
[08:33:19] Error – ‘trust-cert’ sub task errored after 5.61 s
“Error trusting development certificate.”
[08:33:19] ‘trust-dev-cert’ errored after 5.62 s
[08:33:19]
[08:33:19] ==================[ Finished ]==================
Error – [trust-cert] Error: root “Trusted Root Certification Authorities”
Signature matches Public Key
CertUtil: -addstore command FAILED: 0x80070005 (WIN32: 5 ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED)
CertUtil: Access is denied.

Error – [trust-cert] Certificate trust failed with an unknown error.
Error – ‘trust-cert’ sub task errored after 5.61 s
“Error trusting development certificate.”

The only way I could manage to get around it was to manually create a cert using the OOB Windows tools.

Creating your .cer file

1. Start by locating makecert.exe. You can typically find it in and C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\bin\x64 on Windows Server 2012 R2.
2. Browse to that location with Command Prompt with Administrative privileges.
3. You can actually create a certificate to run against your machine name and you can also have it work against localhost. To create a certificate for your machine name, use the following command:

makecert -n “CN=%ComputerName%, CN=localhost” -ss MY -sr LocalMachine -b 08/09/2016 -e 09/09/2028 -a sha256 -sky exchange -r -pe myCert.cer

Return to where you tried to run trust-dev-cert and move to the next step.  We now have a dev cert so there is no use in creating one using gulp.

Thanks to Santi Murtagh for the instructions on setting up the cert.

Creating a Self-Signed SSL Certificate for Developing and Testing Against IIS