Search and restore an item from a SharePoint Online Recycle Bin

It might be difficult to search for an item in a SharePoint recycle bin. I was using the end point _api/site/RecycleBin as a Site Collection Administrator, but in some cases it returns an error “The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold.”.

The solution is to use another end point _api/site/getrecyclebinitems (see the documentation for the various parameters):

fetch("https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/YourSite/_api/site/getrecyclebinitems?rowLimit=%2770000%27&itemState=0&orderby=3&isAscending=false", {
  "headers": {
    "accept": "application/json",
    "content-type": "application/json",
    "x-requestdigest": document.querySelector("#__REQUESTDIGEST").value
  },
  "method": "GET",
})
.then(res => res.json())
.then(json => {
  console.log(json.value);
  // it will show an array with an object that contains several interesting properties:
  // AuthorEmail, AuthorName, DeletedByEmail, DeletedDate, DirName, Id, LeafName, Title, …
})

You can then filter the result to get what you need, for example if you’re looking for an item from the list “Projects” that has the ID 1981:

json.value.filter(item => item.DirName.includes("Lists/Projects") && item.LeafName === "1981_.000");

Then, to restore an item, we need the Id from the previous result. The famous endpoint to restore an item is _api/site/RecycleBin('Id')/restore, however it could also return the error “The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold”. In that case, we can use this other endpoint _api/site/RecycleBin/RestoreByIds:

fetch("https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/YourSite/_api/site/RecycleBin/RestoreByIds", {
  "headers": {
    "accept": "application/json",
    "content-type": "application/json",
    "x-requestdigest": document.querySelector("#__REQUESTDIGEST").value
  },
  "method": "POST",
  "body":JSON.stringify({
    "ids": [
      "4f855ee7-472b-414a-a482-4317a114c1a2" // Id to restore
    ],
    "bRenameExistingItems": true
  })
})