Web

Retrieve header fields like response status from Web.Contents in Power BI and Power Query

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Many Power Query function not only return their values as advertised in their function documentation, but on top of that a metadata record. This record is like tag that holds additional information about the returned main value (for more details about this, please check out my friend Lars Schreiber’s article about it). Useful metadata for … Read more

Tips to download files from webpages in Power Query and Power BI

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When downloading data from the web, it’s often best to grab the data from APIs that are designed for machine-to-machine communication than from the site that’s actually visible on the screen. Not only is the download usually faster, but you also often get more additional parameters that can be very useful. In this article I’m going to show you how to retrieve the relevant URLs for downloading files from webpages (without resorting to external tools like Fiddler) and how to tweak them to your needs.

Retrieving the URL to download files from webpages

Say I want to download historical stock prices from this webpage:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/history?p=AAPL

The screen will show a link to a download:

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Easy POST requests with Power BI and Power Query using Json.FromValue

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The function Json.FromValue provides a super-easy way to create POST-calls to web services that require JSON format in their body parameters. Background If you want to make a POST request to a web service through Power Query, you have to add the relevant data in the “Content”-parameter of the query (see Chris Webb’s article here for … Read more