How to Retrieve Loop Workspaces Data with PowerShell

Report More than 200 Loop Workspaces Requires Fetching Pages of Data

In November 2023, I wrote about a PowerShell script I developed to report the storage consumed by Loop workspaces. The script worked. That is, it worked until a tenant had more than 200 workspaces at which point the script ceased to report details for any more workspaces. This point was recently made to me by a reader after they discovered that the script didn’t produce the desired results in their tenant. Obviously, I didn’t do enough testing to encounter the limit.

Investigation (reading the documentation for the Get-SPOContainer cmdlet) revealed that the cmdlet implements a primitive form of pagination. The default mode is to fetch the first 200 workspaces, but if you know that more workspaces exist, you can add the Paged parameter to the cmdlet.

Odd Pagination to Fetch More Loop Workspaces

APIs implement pagination when they want to limit the amount of data that an app can fetch in one operation. The Graph APIs use pagination for this reason (some of the cmdlets in the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK can perform automatic pagination). The idea is that an app fetches the first page, checks to see if a token (pointer) to the next page is present, and if so, the app uses the token to fetch that page. The process continues until the app has fetched all available pages.

In the case of the Get-SPOContainer cmdlet, if more workspace data are available, the 201^st record in the set fetched from SharePoint is a pointer to the next page of (up to) 200 workspaces. Oddly, the information is in the form of a string followed by the actual token. Here’s an example:

Retrieve remaining containers with token: UGFnZWQ9VFJVRSZwX0NyZWF0aW9uRGF0ZVRpbWU9MjAyNDAzMzAlMjAwMCUzYTU5JTNhMjUmcF9JRD0yMDA=

To fetch the next page, run the Get-SPOContainer cmdlet and specify both the Paged and PagingToken parameters. The value passed in the PagingToken parameter is the token extracted from the record referred to above. The code must also remove the record from the set that will eventually be used for reporting purposes because it doesn’t contain any information about a workspace. For example:

$Token = $null
If ($LoopWorkspaces[200]) {
    # Extract the token for the next page of workspace information
    $Token = $LoopWorkSpaces[200].split(":")[1].Trim()
    # Remove the last item in the array because it's the one that contains the token
    $LoopWorkspaces = $LoopWorkspaces[0..199]
}

Looping to Fetch All Pages

A While loop can then fetch successive pages until all workspaces are retrieved. The curious thing is that at the end of the data, Loop outputs a record with the text. “End of containers view.” It’s just odd:

While ($Token) {
    # Loop while we can get a token for the next page of workspaces
    [array]$NextSetofWorkSpaces = Get-SPOContainer -OwningApplicationID a187e399-0c36-4b98-8f04-1edc167a0996 `
      -PagingToken $Token -Paged
    If ($NextSetofWorkSpaces[200]) {
        $Token = $NextSetofWorkSpaces[200].split(":")[1].Trim()
        $NextSetofWorkspaces = $NextSetofWorkspaces[0..199]
    } Else {
        $Token = $Null
        If (($NextSetofWorkSpaces[$NextSetofWorkspaces.count -1]) -eq "End of containers view.") {  
            # Remove the last item in the array because it contains the message "End of containers view."
            $NextSetofWorkspaces = $NextSetofWorkspaces[0..($NextSetofWorkspaces.count -2)]
        }             
    }
    $LoopWorkspaces += $NextSetofWorkspaces
}

Eventually, you have an array of all the Loop workspaces and can report it as in the previous script (Figure 1).

The script with the updated code can be downloaded from GitHub.

Another Example of SharePoint PowerShell Strangeness

I have no idea why the Loop developers thought it was a good idea to implement their unique style of PowerShell pagination in the Get-SPOContainer cmdlet. What they should have done is implement the All cmdlet as done elsewhere, like the Get-SPOSite cmdlet. Supporting easy retrieval of all workspaces together with server-side filtering capability would be more than sufficient for most scenarios and would result in simpler code to develop and maintain.

Last month, I wrote wondering if Microsoft cared about SharePoint PowerShell. This is yet another example of strangeness in SharePoint PowerShell that reinforces my feeling that no one in Microsoft does care.

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