Article: Grouping of records by Field in list view limited to 20 in Zurich release.

[Ehab Pilloor]

After upgrading to the Zurich release, grouped lists behave differently compared to pre-Zurich releases.

When a list is ungrouped, it correctly respects the list 'Show' option (for example 10, 20, 50, etc.) and displays the expected number of records.

However, when the same list is grouped by any field, the system displays only 20 groups per page, even if the list is configured to show 50 records per page or 10 records per page. This is different from pre-Zurich releases, where users had more flexibility and grouping behavior aligned more closely with the selected records-per-page option.

In Zurich, the platform enforces a hard limit of 20 groups per page for grouped lists. This is intentional and is designed to prevent performance degradation when rendering large grouped datasets. The important detail is that the list 'Show' setting still applies to the number of rows within each group, but it does not control the number of groups displayed per page.

If your use case requires showing more than 20 groups per page, you can override the default behavior by creating a system property.

Create a new property with the name:
glide.db.max.aggregate.size

This is a ServiceNow system property that controls the maximum number of groups rendered in aggregated outputs such as grouped lists (and in some cases aggregated report results). The property type is Integer and it is stored in the System Property [sys_properties] table. The default value is set as 20 , but in many instances the property may not exist until you manually create it.

Docs link: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/platform-administration/r_AvailableSystemProperties.html

(You may search by name for the property in this link.) 

Once this property is added and set (for example 50 or 100), grouped lists will render up to that number of groups per page instead of stopping at 20.

Note: Increasing this value may impact system performance on large datasets, so it’s recommended to raise it gradually and validate performance in a lower environment before applying it broadly in production. Also setting the value to this property applies globally for the instance.