Using Microsoft Graph API Queries to Process Large Amounts of Data

Creating a List of Teams

I’ve written a couple of articles about using Microsoft Graph queries with PowerShell to access data that you can’t normally get to with cmdlets. For instance, this example explains how to report the somewhat bizarre email addresses assigned to Teams channels. When a channel is email-enabled, people can post to the channel by sending email to the assigned address, which is a good way to introduce information into Teams. Apart from being posted as new topics in the channel, messages are captured in the channel’s folder in the SharePoint document library belonging to the team.

Limited Data Returned by Design

But as a comment to the article notes, when you use the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet to send a Graph command to fetch information about the set of Teams in a tenant, the Graph responds with 100 teams. This is what the Graph intends to do because it doesn’t want the response to be too large. And the response is good enough to prove the principle of working with the Graph through PowerShell. However, once you get to production, you probably need to deal with more than 100 teams and need to be able to fetch all the teams in the tenant and process them.

Processing Four Thousand Teams

A few days ago, Mike Tilson posted a note in the Office 365 Facebook group asking if it is “possible to run a report (hopefully via PowerShell) to report on what Microsoft Teams apps (third party apps like Polly) are installed across your environment?” As it happens, the esteemed technical editor for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, Vasil Michev, had written a script to report on apps and tabs. I took his script and made (in my mind) some improvements, and I gave Mike a copy of the script.

Mike’s response was that the script worked great in a small environment but had 2,000+ teams (among 4,000-odd groups) to report on in production. The code needed to be upgraded to process larger numbers.

NextLink is the Key

The solution is a thing called a nextlink, available when Microsoft Graph queries have more data to provide to clients than is returned to the original request (server-side paging). A page is the set of data returned for a Graph call and several pages might need to be retrieved to fetch the full set of objects you want to process The documentation says “When a result set spans multiple pages, Microsoft Graph returns an @odata.nextLink property in the response that contains a URL to the next page of results.” In effect, the nextlink tells the Graph the next set of data to return if an application wishes to request it following its first call. To be sure that you get all data, you need to fetch it page by page until the nextlink is null. This is called pagination.

If you use the Graph Explorer to play with Microsoft Graph queries, you’ll see that a nextlink turns up in calls like “all groups in my organization.” You know it’s a nextlink because it includes the term “skiptoken” as in https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups?$skiptoken=X%274453707402 (a real nextlink is much longer). Microsoft Graph queries can generate nextlinks after fetching less than 100 items. For instance, the default number of folders retrieved from a mailbox is 10.

Solving the Problem

The uprated code:

• Makes the original call to fetch teams and stores the object identifier and display name for each team in a hashtable. A hashtable is suitable when you only need to store two properties. If you need to store more, create and populate a generic list instead.
• Checks if a nextlink is returned.
• If a nextlink is found, make another call to the Graph to fetch another set (page) of data and store those items in the hashtable. This call uses the nextlink to tell the Graph where to start retrieving data.
• Continue until the nextlink is null, meaning that no more data remains to be fetched.

Here’s the code, based on an original solution created by Mike Tilson.

$Uri = "https://graph.microsoft.com/V1.0/groups?`$filter=resourceProvisioningOptions/Any(x:x eq 'Team')"
[array]$Teams = Invoke-WebRequest -Method GET -Uri $Uri -ContentType "application/json" -Headers $Headers | ConvertFrom-Json
If ($Teams.Value.Count -eq 0) { Write-Host "No Teams found - exiting!"; break }
$Teams.Value.ForEach( {
   $TeamsHash.Add($_.Id, $_.DisplayName) } )
$NextLink = $Teams.'@Odata.NextLink'
While ($NextLink -ne $Null) {
   $Teams = Invoke-WebRequest -Method GET -Uri $NextLink -ContentType $ctype -Headers $headers | ConvertFrom-Json
   $Teams.Value.ForEach( {
      $TeamsHash.Add($_.Id, $_.DisplayName) } )
   $NextLink = $Teams.'@odata.NextLink' }

Get-Team Works Too

Another pragmatic solution to the problem of how to fetch all teams in a tenant is to use the Get-Team cmdlet. Using Get-Team is much slower than the code listed above (minutes instead of seconds), but the cmdlet handles the paging for you.

After fetching the set of teams, we can begin to process each team to discover what apps and tabs are installed in it. The Graph calls in the script to fetch channels, tabs, and apps don’t use paging. A team can have up to 200 channels, so I guess the call to fetch channels might need to change to handle such a well-endowed (and possibly confusing) team.

Still Work to Do

Although we can now fetch all the teams in a tenant, things aren’t perfect yet. I found a problem processing archived teams, where the attempt to retrieve app information fails. I can’t see how to identify an archived team from the information returned, so more research is needed. (Update: check the isArchived property in team settings to find archived teams).

Another issue is that the auth token expires after an hour and stops the script. A refresh token is needed at this point. (Update: the latest version of the Teams and Groups Report script illustrates how to renew an access token).

If you’d like to improve the code and make it even better, you can get the script from GitHub. In the meantime, enjoy using Microsoft Graph queries to process data with PowerShell.

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Need help understand how to use PowerShell to manage Office 365 Groups and Teams? The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook contains a ton of examples to help you get going.