Query.MaxItems in Sitecore 8.1

Small tip for people using Query.MaxItems and upgrading to 8.1

Setting the maximum number of results from a Query

As you might know Sitecore has a setting called "Query.MaxItems". The default value of this setting is 100 (well, in the base config file). Setting this value to 0 will make queries return all results without limit - which might (will) have a negative impact on performance in case of a large result set.

We aware that this setting not only influences your own queries, but also some api calls (Axes, SelectItems, ...) and Sitecore fields that use queries underneath. It does not affect fast queries.

The Query.MaxItems value in Sitecore 8.1 : 260

Using queries is in lots of cases not a good idea and as a fan of indexes I (almost) never use them myself but some questions came up when people were upgrading so I decided to blog this little tip: 

in Sitecore 8.1 the Query.MaxItems value is patched in Sitecore.ExperienceExplorer.config and set to 260

If you patched the value yourself and did not use a separate include file (as you should!) and did not take care that your include file comes at the end (prefix with z is a common trick - using a subfolder starting with z- is a better one) this new value of 260 will overwrite yours.