In a previous post I’ve described how to use a custom connector to retrieve data from the Microsoft Graph API. But this requires to register an App and adjusting the M-code in the connector itself requires some M-knowledge. So I thought it might be a good idea to share an alternative method to retrieve data from Teams for example, that works out-of-the-box. There are a couple of endpoints supported currently:
If you query databases who support query folding, you’re probably very aware of every step you take and check if folding happens with every new step like so:
Folding will (usually) happen as long as “View Native Query” isn’t greyed out.
So when doing an inner join on tables whithin the same database, I was a bit surprised to see this greyed out actually. As according to the literature, it should fold.
But guess what? After I expanded a column from it, the folding was back again:
Edit: Microsoft has announced that they don’t support querying MS Graph in Power BI: Lack of Support for Microsoft Graph in Power Query – Power Query | Microsoft Learn
The Graph API can deliver a huge amount of interesting data from your Microsoft 365-universe, but the Graph API custom connector for Power BI is not able to retrieve everything from it in its current shape. So I’ve modified it a bit to squeeze out a bit more of its sweet juice.
When trying to get the details for planner tasks, the following error-message appears:
Some time ago I published a function that extracts all M-code from Power BI (.pbix)-files. Today I publish the pendant to Bulk-extract Power Query M-code from multiple Excel-files at once. The code contains many elements from the before mentioned, so please refer to that article for reference.
The function below has just one parameter where you either fill in a full filename (incl. path) of an Excel file, or a folder path where multiple files reside. The function will automatically detect the right modus and spit out the M-code.
Sometimes I need to retrieve the textual representation of a type in Power Query and I’m using a fairly verbose function that I’ve stolen ages ago (I believe it was here: https://ssbi-blog.de/technical-topics-english/power-query-editor-using-notepad/ ) :
The following steps show how to create a new column in a table using existing custom function code. This works in Power BI as well as in Power Query in Excel:
