Posts in Category ‘Power Query’

Parent-Child Hierarchies with multiple parents in Power BI with Power Query

I’ve written about a method to dynamically flatten parent-child-hierarchies also with multiple parents some while ago here. I’ve actually used this approach for Bill-of-materials cases and refined that approach in a series starting here. There, the quantities are aggregated in M already, as they are not supposed to change. But if one wants to use the hierarchical structure to report on transaction tables where several filters shall be applied, one has to adjust the data model a bit:

DimNodes

If you have parent-child-hierarchy with multiple parents, my function will a table like below, where the children with multiple parents still reside in different rows:

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Power BI administration made easy with Power BI REST API custom connector

Today I read the (as always) great article by Matthew Roche “Governing Power BI just got a little easier” and couldn’t find a description on how to get to this promising window with all the admin goodness. So here it comes how to build your Power BI REST API custom connector then 😉 :

Create a custom connector for the Power BI REST API

Miguel Escobar has done a fantastic job to make it super-easy for you here.

Edit 30th September 2019: This repo has just been updated and includes a version with API secret. So if you’ve downloaded that content before and got an authorization error, please get the new files.

Get data from your connector

After you’ve stored the .mez-file in the correct folder (C:\Users\<YourUserNameGoesHere>\Documents\Power BI Desktop\Custom Connectors) and open Power BI Desktop again, you will be greeted with this warning message: Read more

Debug DAX variables in Power BI and Power Pivot

When you’re dealing with a beast like DAX you can use any help there is, right? So here I show you how you can debug DAX variables who contain tables or show the result of multiple variables at once. So you can easily compare them with each other to spot the reason for problems fast.

Please note, that currently only comma separated DAX code is supported.

Example

Watch this measure from Gerhard Brueckl’s brilliant solution for dynamic TopN clustering with others. It contains 5 variables who return tables and one variable with a scalar:

Measure with variables who contain tables and scalars

If you want to follow along how this calculation is evolving for each value in a matrix, my VarDebugMeasure will show details of every variable like so:

Measure to debug DAX variables

Method

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DAX CALCULATE Debugger

CALCULATE is the most powerful function in DAX, as it allows you to change the filter context under which its expression is evaluated to your hearts content. But with big number of options to choose from, often comes big frustration when the results don’t match expectations. Often this is because your syntax to modify the filter context doesn’t do what you’ve intended. Unfortunately CALCULATE only displays its result and not how it achieved it, so debugging becomes a challenge. This is where my CALCULATE Debugger measure can help out:

DAX CALCULATE Debugger

This is a measure that returns a text-value, showing the number of rows of the adjusted filter context table, the MIN and MAX value of the selected column as well as up to the first 10 values. Just place this measure beneath the CALCULATE-measure in question and try to find the error 😉

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The full Table.ContainsAnywhere function for Power Query in Power BI and Excel

In a previous post I introduced the concept of a function that searches for an occurrence of a character or string within all columns of a table. Here I share the full “Table.ContainsAnywhere” – function with parameters for many useful options.

Function parameters and options

  1.  The first parameter “MyTable” refers to the table to search through
  2.  The 2nd parameter “MySearchStrings” can be either a text field or a list of strings to be searched for. The function will take care of any of these cases automatically.
  3.  If the 2nd parameter is a list and this 3rd parameter is null or not speified, the function will return true if any of the list items is found within the table. But if set to “All”, all list items have to be found somewhere in the table for the function to return true.
  4.  By default, the search will be made in a case sensitive mode (as this is the default-mode in Power Query). But any entry into the 4th function parameter will turn this to a case insensitive mode instead.
  5.  By default, the string or list entry has to match fully with any entry in the table. Again, any entry in the 5th parameter swaps that to a partial match.

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