Hey,
Going off this it mentions there is a 128 limit for everything and the list.metaobject_reference gets a 256 limit. However, this is referring to meta fields and not specifically metaobject fields although I suspected they were the same.
I’m building a Wishlist app for a merchant and they naturally want lists to be able to store more than 256 so I was going to have to break it into multiple fields. Before doing that I tried to add more than 256 just to see and it seems I can add up to 1,024 before getting the "Value has more than 1024 elements." error.
Is the 1,024 limit just for dev stores (would be weird if so) or is it the case for metaobject fields but is just undocumented? The AI assistant seemed convinced it was only 256 too. I don’t want to go down the route of assuming it’s 1,024 to then find out that randomly disappears 
Hi @DanGamble –
Yes, the docs are incorrect, and I can confirm this is not driven by your store’s plan. We do try very hard (I promise) to avoid breaking changes and lowering this limit would class as one.
However I would avoid large lists of references, they can be hard to work with, pagination gets trickier, metaobject loads can be slower (its a larger payload), surfaces like Shopify Functions require small payloads etc. – I can’t speak to your data model specifically but I would consider reversing relationships, if you can.
HTH
Appreciate the confirmation Shaun. I assume where you say reverse relationships you’re referring to using .references and .referencedBy or you mean reverse the decision to go near 1,024 vs 256?
Fully aware of the pagination issues. We’re paginating everything by 25 for this. It only became a requirement as this is a legacy upgrade where legacy was all just in an external DB and some lists were topping ~800 items. The alternative was going down a .items_1, .items_2 , etc. route which I really wanted to avoid
Yes, by reverse I mean rather than have a thing with a single list.metaobject_reference field, with many entries - prefer to model a reference from those metaobjects back to your originating thing. But this is general, not specific, advice – can’t speak to your specific app.
Thanks Shaun, I’ll bear that in mind going forward. I’m sure that’ll definitely open up some possibilities!