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Web Scraping 2: Scrape multiple pages at once and refresh in Power BI service

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In the first post of this series I’ve explained how to simultaneously load and combine multiple (similar structured) tables from ONE PAGE. This post handles the other direction, how to combine tables from DIFFERENT PAGES into one (or to scrape multiple webpages at once). Overview Theoretically, this is quite a simple process: Create a query that fetches and transforms … Read more

A generic SWITCH-function for the query editor in Power BI and Power Query

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Although you can easily replicate the DAX SWITCH-function via list-, table- or record functions in M, I thought it would be convenient for many newbies to have a comfortable M-SWITCH-function that uses (almost) the same syntax than its DAX-equivalent:

SWITCH (
[Month],
    1, “January”,
    2, “February”,
    3, “March”,
    4, “April”,
    5, “May”,
    6, “June”,
    7, “July”,
    8, “August”,
    9, “September”,
    10, “October”,
    11, “November”,
    12, “December”,
    “Unknown month number”
)
DAX Formatter by SQLBI

The DAX-SWITCH-function will retrieve the content of its first argument (expression) ([Month]) and check it against he first parameters of the following pairs (value). If there is a match, the second parameter of the pairs (result, here: month name) is returned and if there is no match, “Unknown month number” will be returned.

How it works

The syntax for the M-function looks like so:

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Web Scraping 1: Combine multiple tables from one page in Power BI and Power Query

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This is a step-by-step description of how to combine multiple tables from one webpage into one table with categories as output. You can also apply this technique to combine tables from other sources as well (like from folder method for example or multiple different webpages (see this article)).

Sometimes the page you want to scrape has multiple tables like here:

0 – Combine multiple tables into one: Input

And you want to combine them into 1 with a Category-column like so:

1 – Combine multiple tables into one: Result

Overview

I will present 2 methods here:

  1. Append-method: This is the obvious one and is fast for just a few tables.
  2. Add-Column-method: A bit more complicated but will be faster for a large number of tables and is also suitable for a dynamic number of tables.

You will also find 2 options at the end of this article:

  1. Use custom functions for multi-step table transformations
  2. Use dynamic filters to select the desired tables

 

Append method

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List.SelectPositions in Power BI and Power Query

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With this new custom function “List.SelectPositions” you can easily select items from a list by just passing a list of their positions within it as the parameter.

What it does

Say you have a list with numbers {1..5} and want to select the 1st, 4th and 5th element from it. Then you can pass these positions to the function as another list: {0, 3, 4}.

ListSelectPositions({1..5}, {0, 3, 4}) will return: {1,4,5}

You see that I’ve decided to follow the zero-based counting principle here, that you find throughout M in the query editor. If you don’t like that, you can use the optional 3rd parameter to let it start to count from 1 instead:

ListSelectPositions({1..5}, {1, 4, 5}, 1) will return {1, 4, 5}

But if you have entered positions that don’t exist, the function will return an error in their positions by default:

ListSelectPositions({1..5}, {1, 4, 5}) will return {2, 5, Error}

because there is no 6th element (you’ve omitted the 3rd parameter that allows you to start counting with 1).

But you can change this behaviour as well through the last optional 4th parameter: Setting it to 0 will fill the missing positions with null like this:

ListSelectPositions({1..5}, {1, 4, 5}, null, 0) will return {2, 5, null}

and setting it to 1 will eliminate it and shorten the list like this:

ListSelectPositions({1..5}, {1, 4, 5}, null, 1) will return {2, 5}

These additional error-handling-options of the 4th parameters are useful for dealing with badly formatted data and if you want to learn more about it, just let me know in the comments so that I can prioritize it.

Function code

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Table.Group: Exploring the 5th element in Power BI and Power Query

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In this post I’ll show you the magic stuff you can do with the 5th parameter (the optional comparer function) of the Table.Group M-function in Power BI and Power Query:

Table.Group parameters

  1. table as table,
  2. key as any,
  3. aggregatedColumns as list,
  4. optional groupKind as nullable number,
  5. optional comparer as nullable function

If you’re not familiar with the 4th parameter (groupKind) already, I strongly recommend to read Chris Webb’s article, as we will build on its knowledge here.

Another aspect worth mentioning for the modus in GroupKind.local is the performance aspect: It runs MUCH faster for large datasets than the default-setting. So if you are sure that your data will always be sorted accordingly, you can speed up your grouping-operations considerably. That means: Your data has to be sorted correctly by default. At least for my tests, you would loose the performance-gain once you’d sort your table by an explicit step before.

You can find an overview of comparer functions here.

Case insensitive grouping

Imagine there was a twist in Chris’ dataset and it would look like so:

Table.Group – Modified Source Data

We would probably not be happy with these results then:

Table.Group Problem with Case Sensitivity

Because M is by default case sensitive, we get more groups than we want. Let’s try Comparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase to the rescue then:

Pretty neat, isn’t it 😉  (You can use that comparer in other functions as well, see here for text- and list operations)

Something like this was what I’ve showed Huang Caiguang the other day, who asked me what the 5th parameter of this function was about (or so I understood). He then sent me a link to one of his articles, which demanded a good 2 hours for me to digest and understand: We can also use custom functions to create all different sorts of grouping behaviours here. These are my 2 favourites:

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Import text from pdf files in Power BI

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While Power BI will soon provide functions to import tables from pdf-files, there might be occasions when you actually need to import text from pdf files (in unstructured form). With a little help from R in Power BI you can do exactly that. (And don’t worry: No need to learn R here: The necessary R-code is already included in my function … Read more