Reza Rad continues his series on Power BI date dimensions:
To get public holidays live, you first need an API that is giving you up-to-date information. There are some web pages that has the list of public holidays. I have already explained in another blog post how to use a web page and query public holidays from there. That method uses custom functions as well, here you can read about that.
The method of reading data from a web page has an issue already; Web.Page function from Power Query is used to pull data from that page, and this function needs a gateway configuration to work. There is another function Xml.Document that can work even without the gateway. So because of this reason, we’ll use Xml.Document and get data from an API that provides the result set as XML.
WebCal.fi is a great free website with calendars for 36 countries which I do recommend for this example. This website, provides the calendars through XML format. There are other websites that give you the calendar details through a paid subscription. However, this website is a great free one which can be used for this example. WebCal.fi is created by User Point Inc.
This was an interesting approach to the problem, one I did not expect when first reading the article. I figured it’d be some sort of date calculation script.