Thank you Carl Albury for your reply. I have been looking into this issue a little bit deeper, and came to the conclusion that the amount of returned items always matched the expected outcome. It just inconsistently returned duplicate and missing items. My solution was to check for duplicate items in the returned list, and redo the entire search until I got a list without duplicates. So far this has done the job:
def search_gis_layers(
gis_portal: Any,
query: str,
item_type: str,
max_items: int = 1000,
failures: int = 0,
) -> List[Any]:
"""Search layers in ArcGIS Online.
:param gis_portal: Connection to ArcGIS Online portal
:param query: the string to search for
:param item_type: item type to search for
:param max_items: the maximum numbers of items to return
:param failures: the number of incomplete requests
:return: list of items"""
item_search = gis_portal.content.search(
query, item_type=item_type, max_items=max_items
)
search_result = []
mission_failed = False
for item in item_search:
if item not in search_result:
search_result.append(item)
else:
logging.error(f"{item} is already present in list search_result")
mission_failed = True
failures += 1
break
if mission_failed and failures < 10:
return search_gis_layers(gis_portal, query, item_type, max_items, failures)
elif mission_failed and failures >= 10:
sys.exit(
"Mission failed. Tried 10 times, the returned layer list remained incomplete."
)
else:
return search_result
