For the context: I have some hard coded measures in my report and would like to change them to be dynamic, my question is that is that possible to retrieve information like
name of the report
name of the tabs
name of the used filters per tabs
Related
I am new here, so apologies upfront if my structure is not correct, will try my best to make sure the outline is as neat as possible.
Problem
I have a powerBI report that consists of a home page and sub-report. The one report is called Home which shows a summary of all the employee type output information and the other is Employee type which shows information per type. I am using PowerAutomate to export those reports (consolidated) and save them into a sharepoint. The mechanism is working as intended for the home report, but is not for the Employee sub-report.
I have noticed that in the Employee subreport I have a filter for Employee types which has:
{Half-Time, Permanent, Contractor, Vendor-Contractor}
Each selection in the drop down will present different results in the report.
My PowerAutomate flow is an approval process for stakeholders to sign off the reports per Employee Type. when ever I trigger the action button on my PowerBI report it runs the flow and saves the Export to file for PowerBI report to my sharepoint, with Home page correct, but Employee sub-report page always showing the first selection Employee type within the array(Half-Time), where I want it to show the report based on the user selected results.
Here are the inputs I have added to the Export PowerBI action in PowerAutomate
I am not sure what I am doing wrong, I have tried a myriad of different options even tried the filter for EmployeeType, but it creates a loop in flow and doesnt yield any of the results I need.Any help would be much appreciated
I tried adding the report sections in the PowerBI action which did consolidate a PDF for the Home page and Employee sub-report, but kept showing the fist item in the filter selection as opposed to user selected item with respective results.
I also tried initializing a variable to show user selected item in the Employee type array, this did nothing, same results as above.
I am encountering a problem in BI (data visualization over historical data) that isn't unique to any BI tool (e.g., Power BI, Qlik Sense, Tableau). I need a way to add context (e.g., descriptive text) to certain events in my company's historical data, such that we don't need to explain anomalies in data visuals to new users of a report. For example, in a visual of sales over time, we want verbiage to appear in a tooltip for certain points in time. This verbiage will be created by report users and saved (somehow). So, this is like storytelling in BI, but with the difficulty that the verbiage / context needs to remain after dataset refreshes. It would be ideal to have this be tool-agnostic, but it's fine if it needs to be tool-specific (e.g., using Power BI's comments feature).
Is there a way to achieve this?
For summary reports (that display aggregated values) you may include these descriptive texts into the report as a special measure.
For example, let's assume that your report displays sales amount per year/month/category. In terms of SQL data for this report is loaded with a query like that:
select year(date_col) as dim_year, month(date_col) as dim_month, sum(amount) as sales_amount from transactions
group by 1, 2
To display some commentary text it should be joined to the aggregation result - for example:
select dim_year, dim_month, sales_amount, c.comment as sales_amount_comment from (
select year(date_col) as dim_year, month(date_col) as dim_month, sum(amount) as sales_amount
from transactions
group by 1, 2
) res
left join comments c on (c.year=res.dim_year and c.month=res.dim_month)
(assuming that comments table has columns year, month, comment)
Next steps depend on your BI tool, in most cases you can simply display 2 measures (sales_amount and sales_amount_comment) in the pivot table, if BI tools allows custom HTML formatting this could be a one table cell that shows amount value and displays the comment on mouse over (say, wrapped with <div title='comment text'>) or smth like that.
It is up to you how users will populate comments table; it can be loaded from Google Sheets, or simple custom CRUD app may be used to add/edit records.
I noticed very odd thing that Daxstudio allows you to view original table name. It is a bit niuanse because when you rename table created in M then Daxstudio still refers to it using original table name, not the new name. Here is how to reproduce the bug.
Power BI > Home > Enter Data
Name the table RedTable.
Run a query in Daxstudio:
EVALUATE
DISTINCT('RedTable'[Column1])
Now rename the table to BlueTable:
And run the query in Daxstudio for a new table name:
You can still see the original table name in the Query column of Server Timings.
Is there a way to change this original table name created with M?
I can add that this bug is applicable only to tables created with M (be it Enter Data or plug to Server). This bug is not reproducible with DAX tables. The DAX tables are updated after you change their name and actual (not original) name is display in Query column of Server Timings of Daxstudio.
This is not a problem of DAX Studio, even though we could try to fix it in DAX Studio. :)
Here is what happens: the Tabular model (used also by Power BI) has an ID for each object and then a Name. The ID is assigned by the Power BI and Visual Studio UI when you create an entity (table/column/...). Visual Studio shows the ID as a readonly property, whereas Power BI doesn't show that property at all.
The ID is used internally to reference the objects in the Tabular Object Model (TOM). It is also used to identify column in the interaction between Formula Engine and Storage Engine.
The Storage Engine queries captured by DAX Studio are messages intercepted with a debugging session connected to the Analysis Services session and in these messages the text represents entities (in particular table names) through their ID rather than through the Name property.
As Microsoft would say, this is "by design".
So far, DAX Studio simply capture the text of the storage engine queries and display this information.
However, DAX Studio "massages" the text, removing a lot of "noise" and making the query more readable. During this phase, it is possible to consider renaming IDs with Names.
I just created a feature request. That was easy. When to implement the feature, finding the time is much harder!
My power Bi model contains the following tables:
However, when I connect to this model from DAX studio, I get the following:
Please note that all of these local date tables show the same metadata like the date table. Is this a potential problem? I believe this might be the reason behind this report working comparatively slow while development.
These tables show date tables automatically created by Power BI for all fields type "Date", to enable date hierarchy for them (year/quarter/month/day).
If you want to remove them, go to File/Options, then under "Current File" uncheck "Auto Date/Time":
These hidden tables will disappear. If you want to turn this feature off for all future/new files (I always do), uncheck a similar option under "Global".
I am new to Power BI, doing some work.
I have millions of records in SQL Server database, what i want to achieve is..
whenever my colleagues open the report on Power BI, it must ask for the date parameter.
Once the date is submitted, then it must go to the SQL Server and fetch the data and then it must display the report.
Is it possible?
If it is, could some one please show me how to achieve it?
If you define a parameter in your report and use it for filtering data, when you load the report, the data matching the filter will be loaded. You can provide a default value, that you know will return no data (e.g. date in the future, if you are showing the data on or after some date).
You can declare a parameter (in your case of date data type) and use it to filter the data. To declare it, open your report in Power BI Desktop, go to Power Query Editor (by clicking on Edit Queries button in the ribbon) and define a new parameter in Manage Parameters dialog:
Make sure the data type of the parameter matches the type of your data, i.e. if your data has time, define Date/Time parameter. If your data is Date, define Date data type parameter.
Then go to your query, which you want to filter and click on the button in the header of the column you which to filter. In Date/Time filters menu choose how to filter the data, e.g. to fetch the data that is on or after some date:
Then you can close Power Query Editor and return to the report. You can change the parameter's value from the drop down under Edit Queries - Edit Parameters.
If you want to avoid loading data for the default value of the parameter, you can save this report as template (File -> Export -> Power BI template), and then send this template to your colleagues. When they open it, they will be prompted to enter values for the defined parameters, and only after that, the report will connect to the data source and fetch the matching data. This means that first, you didn't use Power BI Online, but shared the report as a file, and second your colleagues has access to the data source to be able to load the data.
If you must publish the report to Power BI Online, then you can use completely different technique - instead of defining a parameter, pass the filter in the report's URL. When the report is loaded normally (e.g. you go to the workspace and open the report), it will show all the data (it will not be filtered). However, you can prepare a special URL for your colleagues, by appending ?filter=MyTable/DateColumn ge 2019-02-04 to the report's URL that you see in the browser's address bar. Replace MyTable with the name of the table you want to filter (e.g. SalesData) and DateColumn with the name of the field on which you want to filter (e.g. SalesDate). If there are spaces in these names, you must replace them with _0x0020_, but if possible, just avoid them. After that the filter defines an operator for filtering, e.g. ge means greater than or equals. And at the end is the value (the date in your case).
You can make a web page, where the user can select a date, and this page will generate the appropriate URL for your report. Or you can make another report, where the URL is constructed as a computed column or a measure based on some conditions (e.g. selecting a date from a slicer) and the user can click on the hyperlink, which will load the actual report, but filtered.