Maximum of 10 fields in a Secure Store Target Application

The blog post title pretty much says it all - in all variants of the Secure Store Service Application: both SharePoint 2010 and 2013; on-premises or Office 365; you can't have more than 10 fields in a Target Application.

This seems a rather arbitrary and constrictive limitation - in the app I was working on we had a total of 11 fields that we wanted to secure so now we will have to create two Target Applications which is an annoying additional overhead.

Trying to do this through the UI gives an error with "The maximum field number was reached.", here's a screenshot of it in the newly release SharePoint 2013 version of Office 365:

This error dialog popus once when you hit "Add Field" if you already have 10 fields listed.

If you try via PowerShell, then you get this response:


New-SPSecureStoreApplication : Specified argument was out of the range of valid values.
Parameter name: applicationFields


I couldn't find this limitation documented anywhere other than in this Office 365 article - but of course, the limitation is broader than just SharePoint Online.

It's not a blocking issue because you can always create more Target Applications, but hopefully being aware of this limitation will allow you to plan out your Target Applications without having to figure out why your PowerShell deployment scripts don't seem to behave as expected.