Today I’ll present an adjustment to the Text.SplitAny – function in Power BI’s query editor or Power Query. The native function takes a string as an input and splits the text by every character that is contained in the string. This seems fairly unusual to me and I haven’t used that function very often.
But what I have come across fairly often is the requirement to split a string by a bunch of different (whole) strings (instead of single characters).
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Although this might not be what the inventors of Power BI had in mind, large lots of folks are trying to create classical financial statements in it. And putting aside the afford that might go into getting the numbers right, there is still a major drawback to swallow:
In this blogpost I’ll show you how to create a list of account numbers from the totalling syntax that you find in Dynamics NAV account schedules or chart of accounts for example:
1000..1090|1500|2000..2020
This string shall be transformed into a “real” list of account numbers in the query editor that can be used to select all accounts within those ranges.
The M-function Text.BetweenDelimiters does what it says and returns the text between 2 delimiters in the query editor of Power BI and Power Query. But irrespective of its optional arguments you can use to select specific occurrences, it will always only return one string found.
How to retrieve all occurrences of strings between in a text field like here for example: I’d like to get a list that contains “Python” and “R”:
“Meanwhile I prefer +Python!+ to +R!+”
Meaning all strings found between the delimiters “+” and “!+”.
This function will return the desired list:
Recently I picked up an interesting request to transform text with exceptions: Transform the words in a column to proper case, but keep certain keywords like in a defined list.
Say you have a list with specific terms that shouldn’t be proper cased like so:
And you want to proper case the following column:
So I proper case each word that is not contained in the “KeepTable”, identify the elements in the “KeepTable” in a case insensitive way and transform them into the syntax that’s specified in the “KeepTable”.
Today I want to share a scenario where a running total calculation in the query editor saved a model that run out of memory when done with DAX:
The model couldn’t be refreshed and returned out of memory error with a calculated column in the fact table of over 20 Mio rows (from a csv-file). A running total should be calculated for each “JourneyID”, of which there were over 1 Mio in the table itself. This rose memory consumption during refresh by over 300 % – until it finally errored out:
Besetzung =
CALCULATE (
SUM ( Fact[Entries] )
– SUM ( Fact[Exits] );
FILTER (
ALLEXCEPT ( Fact; Fact[JourneyID] );
Fact[StopId]
<= EARLIER ( Fact[StopId] )
)
)