Category: Power BI

Dustin Ryan shows how you can have Power BI perform incremental refresh against a .NET Web API source:

The customer is using Power BI to report on data from Service Now via APIs. So the customer was able to quickly connect Power BI to Service Now data and begin reporting on relevant datasets very quickly. The challenge, however, is that querying multiple years of data via the API was less than desirable for a variety of reasons.

The customer was interested in exploring the incremental refresh capabilities of Power BI, but were worried about using Power BI’s native incremental refresh capability since query folding (if you’re new to query folding, read this here) is not supported by Power BI’s web connector. So the customer team reached out to me with the challenge and I worked up an example that I think will help them meet their requirement.

Click through for the solution.

Ed Hansberry gives us a second option for filtering dimension values:

I don’t like loading up a slicer with dozens or hundreds of items that have no corresponding records. The same would apply if there was no slicer, but the consumer wanted to filter using the Filter pane. So I’ll filter the customer table so it only includes what I would call “active customers” that are shown in the sales table.

The most straight forward way to do this is by doing an Inner Join between the tables, but there is another way, using the powerful List.Contains() feature of Power Query. And what makes it so powerful is not just it’s utility, but when you run it against data in a SQL Server or similar server, Power Query will fold the statement.

Let me walk you through both methods so it is clear.

Read on for the walkthrough.

Gilbert Quevauvilliers fixes a problem of overlap:

Recently a user sent me a message saying that they could no longer click on a slicer item. I tried to myself and I had no issues clicking on the slicer item.

I then had an online screen share with the user, so that I could see what was happening when they were trying to click on the Slicer item. What had happened is they were using a lower screen resolution. What this did then was to place the Visual Header Icons over multiple lines, which then did not allow the top slicer item to be clicked on.

Click through for the solution.

James Serra gives us a few options to monitor different aspects of Power BI:

Performance analyzer: Find out how each of your report elements, such as visuals and DAX formulas, are performing. Using the Performance Analyzer, you can see and record logs that measure how each of your report elements performs when users interact with them, and which aspects of their performance are most (or least) resource intensive. This is accomplished by clicking a “Start recording” button and interacting with the elements you want to test. More info at Use Performance Analyzer to examine report element performance.

Click through for several other tools, which you can combine to get a better feel for how your environment is doing.

Melissa Coates has a video and an article for us:

Including documentation alongside the dataset is helpful for teammates who might need to work on this dataset at some point, or even for yourself in the future. It also means you won’t have an empty report, and you won’t need to delete the empty report once the file is published to the service.

Click through for plenty of useful information on the why and how, as well as what to watch out for.

Imke Feldmann explains how you can perform paging with Power Query:

When you use an API with a paging mechanism (like the example from this blogpost), you’ll might work with a field that contains the address for the next page. You can use this to walk through the available chunks until you reach the last element. That last element in the pagination will not contain a next-field or that field will be null.

There is a bit of nuance to this, so click through and learn how.

Teo Lachev hits on an annoyance I have with Power BI:

The Power BI image-rendering visualizations, such as Table or Card, expect image links to public servers hosting the images with anonymous permissions. This has obvious shortcomings. Can we load images from a database or Power BI data table? You bet, as Jason Thomas has demonstrated a long time ago. Here are the steps I followed to show the images from the Production.ProductPhoto table in the AdventureWorks2012 (or later) database. If you want to embed a few images into a Power BI data table (instead of an external database), you can convert them manually to Base64 using any of the online image converters, such as https://codebeautify.org/image-to-base64-converter and embed the resulting string into a Power BI data table (the Enter Data feature). Gerhard Brueckl takes this one step further by showing you how to automate the base64 conversion with many images.

The experience for displaying images isn’t the worst—I don’t mind needing base64 encoded strings for images—but there’s a strict limit on how large your images can be, and that size is puny. I have one dashboard where I show a CPU chart from Grafana and I have to leave it at a very small resolution or else I don’t get to see the whole chart—it cuts off in the middle.