Random Procrastination

Darren Gosbell

Category: Power BI

Power BI – Using Field Parameters in Paginated Reports

November 22, 2022 / / 2 Comments

Field Parameters are a relatively new feature in Power BI which are still in preview and they add a lot of flexibility to an interactive reporting solution, but can they be used in paginated reports?

The short answer is yes, but the experience is not as simple as it is in Power BI Desktop. The reason for this is that Power BI Desktop does not just pass field parameters as filters to other visuals, they actually change the way the underlying DAX queries are generated.

The following example of an Adventure Works based report with a field parameter that allows the user to choose between showing either the Total Sales measure or the Total Quantity measure.

If we use the Performance Analyzer in Power BI Desktop to capture all the queries for this page we find 2 sets of queries.

The first one for the slicer looks as follows and just gets a list of values from our Field parameter table:

// DAX Query
DEFINE
  VAR __DS0Core = 
    SUMMARIZE(
      VALUES('Measures Parameter'),
      'Measures Parameter'[Measures Parameter Fields],
      'Measures Parameter'[Measures Parameter Order],
      'Measures Parameter'[Measures Parameter]
    )

  VAR __DS0PrimaryWindowed = 
    TOPN(
      101,
      __DS0Core,
      'Measures Parameter'[Measures Parameter Order],
      1,
      'Measures Parameter'[Measures Parameter],
      1,
      'Measures Parameter'[Measures Parameter Fields],
      1
    )

EVALUATE
  __DS0PrimaryWindowed

ORDER BY
  'Measures Parameter'[Measures Parameter Order],
  'Measures Parameter'[Measures Parameter],
  'Measures Parameter'[Measures Parameter Fields]

To start integrating our Field Parameters into our paginated report we can create a new paginated report using Power BI Report Builder and we can copy and paste this query into a new dataset. I’ve called this dataset “MeasureParameter” in the screenshot below:

We can then create a new report Parameter linked to this dataset. I’ve called my parameter “MeasureName” and I’ve linked up the available values as follows:

Note that I’m using the field for the Value property which returns the full DAX reference for the measure (eg. ‘Sales'[Total Sales]) and I’m using the display name of the measure for the label field (eg. “Total Sales”)

This will generate a parameter like the following when the paginated report is run to allow the user to select which measure to use:

If we then look at the second set of queries in the Performance Analyzer, we can see that the there are actually 2 queries.

  1. Gets the data for the chart and this query is dynamically generated
  2. Gets the name of the currently selected Field Parameter which is used to populate the chart title and axis labels

We can ignore query 2 as we already have the information about the field parameters in our MeasureParameters dataset, but how do we dynamically generate our query in the same way that Power BI does?

The answer to this is using expressions. Paginated Reports are extremely powerful in this regard and almost all of the properties of the objects in a report can set using expressions – even the query text and that is what we are going to do in this case.

If we look at the text of the first query we captured from Performance Analyzer, it looks as follows:

Where you can see on lines 4 and 7 that the ‘Sales'[Total Sales] measure is referenced (which I’ve highlighted in yellow. And on lines 7, 10 and 16 that this is given a name of [Total_Sales] in the output from the query. The [Total_Sales] is just a column name in the results of the query and we could leave it as end users of our report will not see this reference, but I prefer to make it clear that this is may not always be the Sales measure, so I renamed it to [Measure_Value]

Then I created a new Dataset called “Dataset1” and pasted the above static query in and clicked “OK” this saves our dataset and generates the field mappings for us. (you can manually create the field mappings from the resultset to the paginated dataset, but I find this method of starting with a static query easier)

Then to make this query dynamic I clicked the “fx” button next to the Query property to open the expression editor.

I then made the following changes to the query text:

  1. First, I started the expression with an = sign, this tells the report engine that this value needs to be evaluated as an expression. Then I added a double quote character as this is the start of a string expression.
  2. Then I added a closing double quote character at the end of the query.
  3. I then went through the rest of the query and doubled up any existing double quote characters to escape them.
  4. Finally, I inserted some concatenation expressions to add in the Value property from our MeasureName parameter which we added earlier using the Parameters!MeasureName.Value reference.
configuring the dynamic query

So, we now have a dynamic query which will inject the measure to be used based on the parameter chosen by the user at run time.

To test this we can put a simple table on our report canvas and link up the Color and Measure value fields

Configuring the column references for the table visual

This gives us a table which looks like the following

The design time report layout

And when we run it and choose a measure from the parameter we get the data we expect, but we cannot easily tell from the report which measure was selected by the user since the column header just says “ID Measure Value”. So if this report was exported to a PDF or sent as part of an emails subscription it might be hard to tell which measure was selected.

The basic report with a dynamic query

To fix this we can right click on the “ID Measure Value” header and turn this column header into an expression instead of being static text.

Editing the measure expression for the column header

Then we can use an expression like the following to use the label of the selected parameter value as column header

=Parameters!MeasureName.Label

If we also bold the column headers, now when we run our report, we get an experience almost identical to that in Power BI Desktop and our table now shows which measure was selected in the header for the measure column.

Final Report

This same technique of using an expression-based query could be adapted to work with field parameters that reference columns instead of measures. The expression for the query would just need to be adjusted differently, but I will leave this as an exercise for the reader.

DAX Studio and Tabular Editor – better together

August 25, 2020 / / 0 Comments

I love love the way Phil Seamark likes to push the art of the possible with the Microsoft BI platform. And I really liked his recent article on using VS Code to query a Power BI file and generate measures. But as I was reading that blog post I could not help but think that it was going to be outside of the comfort zone of a lot of Power BI users.

I know a lot of BI developers that have strong skills in DAX, Power Query and SQL, but don’t often use C# and many of them don’t use VS Code and have not heard of nuget. So this made me wonder if there was a another way of doing the same thing with the tools that many BI developers already use like DAX Studio and Tabular Editor

I actually figured out a couple of approaches to achieving the same result as Phil. The first one uses the following 2 pieces of information.

  1. Tabular Editor has a brilliant feature called Advanced Scripting which lets you run little pieces of C# code and is an excellent way of automating changes in your models. And in addition to being able to use the standard properties and methods Daniel has build a series of helpful “helper” methods like AddMeasure which has parameters for <Name>, <Expression> and <Folder>.
  2. As I showed in my previous post where I generated part of a DAX query using another DAX query. It is possible with some careful string manipulation to use DAX to generate other code such as the C# using in the Tabular Editor Advance Scripting feature.

If we combine the two pieces of information above we end up with the following query which generates a Tabular Editor AddMeasure() call for each value in Product[Color].

EVALUATE 
ADDCOLUMNS(
VALUES('Product'[Color])
,"ScriptExpression"
,var _color = 'Product'[Color] 
var _name = "Sum of " & _color & " Sales Amount"
var _expression = "CALCULATE(SUM('Sales'[Sales Amount]) ,'Product'[Color] = \""" & _color & "\"")"                     
return "Model.Tables[""Sales""].AddMeasure( """ & _name & """, """ & _expression & """, ""AutoMeasures"");"
)

When you open DAX Studio from the External Tools menu and run this query you get output that looks like the following and you can selected the “ScriptExpression” column and copy that.

Then you open Tabular Editor from the External Tools menu. Click on the Advanced Scripting tab and paste in the output from the “ScriptExpression” column. Note this may include the “ScriptExpression” column header at the top which you will need to delete.

(note to self, I should add a “copy without headers” option to DAX Studio, there is an option for this, but it would be nice to add it to the right-click menu on the results)

Then when you click “run” (1) on the advance script, you will see a folder with all your new measures appear (2). You can then check that the expression has been entered correctly and click save (3) to make these appear back in Power BI Desktop.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series where I will show another technique for doing this.

Power BI Report Server – fixing Pending subscriptions

June 17, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Last week I came across an issue where a number of our paginated report subscriptions at work failed to go out. When we checked in the Portal these subscriptions had a status of “Pending”. This happened on our production Power BI Report Server instance which is currently running the Sep 2019 release.

This was very strange as these subscriptions had been running for months and months without issue and just stopped all of a sudden. It was even more confusing as we had some reports with multiple subscriptions and some of the subscriptions were still working while others were stuck with a status of “Pending”.

With no other information to go on in the Portal I started looking through the log files. This was complicated in our case as we have over one and a half thousand users and hundreds of report subscriptions. We also have 2 instances of PBIRS (Power BI Report Server) behind a load balancer which means two sets of log files to search through.

So I started by going to one of the pending subscriptions and clicking on the edit option

When you do this you will see the URL change to something like the following where there is a guid at the end with the SubscriptionId:

By default PBIRS writes a number of log files out to a folder at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Report Server\PBIRS\LogFiles If you look in this folder it will look something like the following with a bunch of different files with date stamps on the end. In this case because the issue is with a paginated report we need to look in the ReportingServicesService*.log files

What I found in one of the log files when I searched for the subscription Id was the following error

Error processing data driven subscription a743db7f-bbbe-4c45-9da1-2e2e286992dd: Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.UnknownUserNameException: The user or group name '<domain>\<contractor user>' is not recognized.

Where the <domain> was our company’s AD domain and <contractor user> was the login that had been used by a short term contractor that had worked with us to build the report in question.

In our case the account in question had been disabled when the contractor left the organization. So obviously nothing was checking the enabled state of this account.

But as it turns out that our AD team had done one of their periodic clean-ups yesterday where they actually deleted a whole group of disabled accounts. So it appeared that this was related somehow to this account no long existing in AD.

We already knew from years of working with Reporting Services that when a subscription is executed that the Owner of the subscription is checked to make sure a valid account is specified. (I believe this is possibly a security measure to stop people setting up a schedule to send reports to somewhere after they have left a company). However we already had the contractor set the subscription owner to one of our service accounts when they created the subscription to try and prevent this very scenario from happening.

In fact searching through all the properties for the subscription in the portal showed no sign of the <contractor user> account anywhere.

At this point I decided to open up a PowerShell window and use one of the tools from the ReportingServicesTools PowerShell module to see if that could shed any more light on this issue.

When I ran the Get-RsSubscription cmdlet I noticed the following:

Sitting in the ModifiedBy property of the subscription object was a reference to our <contractor user> which we were seeing in the error in the log file.

When running Get-RsSubscription against a report where some subscriptions were working and others were stuck in a “Pending” state I could see that the working subscriptions had a ModifiedBy of an account belonging to someone who still had an active account in AD.

My guess as to what is happening here is that Report Server is attempting to populate some of the properties of a user object from Active Directory and is failing now that the users has been physically deleted and this is throwing an exception that is preventing the entire subscription from continuing with it’s execution.

So if you only have a handful of subscriptions stuck in a pending state like this you can just edit them in the portal and make some non-functional change like adding a full stop to the end of the subscription name. This will set the ModifiedBy to your user account and the subscription will start working again.

In our case we took a backup of the ReportServer database and then ran an update statement to set the guid of the ModifiedBy to the guid of our service account user. This is not a supported activity and something you would do at your own risk. But in our case it did allow us to quickly fix numerous “broken” subscriptions that would have taken hours to fix through the UI.

Power BI Report Server needs an Admin Portal

I think one area where Power BI Report Server could do with some more work is in the area of administrator tools. At the moment if a report fails to render because of an error you have to wait for a user to report it. And if a subscription fails to send there is no central place where you can see these issues and easily take steps to correct them.

Power BI: How to make the Gantt chart show events in progress

February 25, 2020 / / 15 Comments

I had a colleague approach me at work with an interesting problem. He had a Power BI report using the Gantt chart custom visual however when he used a date slicer to select a date range it was only showing events which started on that date range and he wanted to see any events that were in progress for that date range.

I figured out a way to get this working and I thought it might be helpful to not just show the solution, but also to walk through the process I used to develop it. Let’s start by looking at an example of the issue he was dealing with.

Given the following data, what he wanted was to filter the data for dates between Mar-20 to Apr-10 so that the Gantt chart would show the section in Yellow below:

But he was getting output like the following, where it was only showing the bottom 3 tasks from the image above with a start date between Mar-20 and Apr-10. It was not showing tasks which were already in progress like the first two (Division… and Functional…).

To figure out what options we had to change this default behaviour I turned on the Performance Profiler in Power BI Desktop (I could also have used the All Queries trace in DAX Studio). This captured the following query for the Gantt visual:

// DAX Query
DEFINE VAR __DS0FilterTable = 
  FILTER(
    KEEPFILTERS(VALUES('Table1'[Start Date])),
    AND('Table1'[Star Date] >= DATE(2016, 3, 20), 'Table1'[Start Date] < DATE(2016, 4, 11))
  )

EVALUATE
  TOPN(
    1002,
    SUMMARIZECOLUMNS(
      'Table1'[Task Name],
      'Table1'[Task ID],
      'Table1'[Start Date],
      'Table1'[Resource],
      __DS0FilterTable,
      "MinEnd_Date", CALCULATE(MIN('Table1'[End Date]))
    ),
    'Table1'[Task ID],
    1,
    'Table1'[Task Name],
    1,
    'Table1'[Start],
    1,
    'Table1'[Resource],
    1
  )

ORDER BY
  'Table1'[Task ID], 'Table1'[Task Name], 'Table1'[Start], 'Table1'[Resource]

There are two important parts to notice from the above query.

First is that the filter is currently explicitly filtering for start dates based on the values selected in the slicer. Obviously this is going to cause an issue as events that are already in-progress will have a start date before the earliest date in the slicer.

To fix this we need to create a separate date table that does not have a relationship to our main fact table. In the demo file I simply created a calculated table using Date Slicer = CALENDARAUTO() but you can use whatever method you like to create this table.

If we replace the 'Table1'[Start Date] field used in the slicer that “fixes” our issue of start dates earlier than those in the slicer being filtered out, but now our slicer is not filtering the data at all, but all is not lost, we will fix that next.

The second interesting thing that I noticed from the captured query is that [Start Date] is being used as a grouping column in the SUMMARIZECOLUMNS() function, but [End Date] is getting the earliest end using CALCULATE(MIN('Table1'[End Date])). What is happening is that the Gantt chart is creating an implied measure when we pass in the [End Date] column. So instead of letting the Gantt chart create an implied measure we can create our own measure and use that instead.

Below is the measure I developed

Gantt End Date = 
VAR _maxDate =
    MAX ( 'Date Slicer'[Date] )
VAR _minDate =
    MIN ( 'Date Slicer'[Date] )
VAR _tasks = VALUES(Table1[Task ID])
RETURN
    MAXX (
        CALCULATETABLE (
            SUMMARIZE( Table1, Table1[Start Date], Table1[End Date] ),
            Table1[Start Date] <= _maxDate,
            Table1[End Date] >= _minDate,
            _tasks
        ),
        Table1[End Date]
    )

This gives us the following

If you look at the output of this measure in a table all it does is the following:

Note that I’ve force the display of all rows by including a simple row count measure. This lets us see that the [Gantt End Date] only returns values where the End date is after the start of the selected date range and the start is before the end of the selected date range, otherwise it returns a blank and SUMMARIZECOLUMNS does not return rows where all the measures return blank.

If you want to look at the Power BI file I used in the screenshots for this post you can download it from here

Building custom Data Bars in Power BI using SVG measures

November 4, 2019 / / 1 Comment

So a while ago Power BI enabled the ability to display SVG images in tables and matrix visuals.  SVG is an XML based language and is actually what the majority of Power BI visual use to render their charts so this technique works really well in Power BI and gives you a way of drawing custom elements in your reports without having to go down the path of building a full blown custom visual. There have been some interesting examples of using this feature such as the sparkline measures created by David Eldersveld (blog) and Reed Haven (blog) and even this funky elephant on hatfullofdata.blog. .

However recently a friend of mine was wanting a way to just build some simple custom data bars with dynamic coloring. So I pulled together an example which produces the following output:

Basically I’m using a text element to output the measure value and drawing a small rectangle under the text calculating the length of the rectangle based of the percentage of the max value. There is also a conditional statement to make amounts less than 50 appear in red.

The code to produce this is relatively simple and I’ve broken it down into a bunch of different variables to hopefully make it easier to understand. 

DataBar = 
    var _barMaxValue = MAXX(all(Sales[Category]), calculate(SUM(Sales[Amount])))
    var _barValue    = SUM(Sales[Amount])
    var _svgWidth    = 200
    var _svgHeight   = 200
    var _barHeight   = 30
    var _barWidth    = INT( (_barValue / _barMaxValue) * _svgWidth )
    var _fill        = IF( _barValue > 50, "blue", "red")
    var _svg_font    = "normal 100px sans-serif"
    var _svg_start   = "data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 " & _svgWidth & " " & _svgHeight & "'>"
    var _svg_end     = "</svg>"
    var _svg_rect    = "<rect x='0' y='135' width='" & _barWidth & "' height='" & _barHeight & "' style='fill:" & _fill & ";fill-opacity:0.4' />"
    var _svg_text    = "<text x='5' y='120' witdh='" & _svgWidth & "' height='" & _svgHeight & "' style='font:" & _svg_font & "'>" & _barValue & "</text>"
return
    _svg_start &  _svg_rect & _svg_text  & _svg_end

The only “trick” to getting these SVG images to display correctly in the Table and Matrix visuals is to set their Data Category to ImageUrl. If you don’t do this the measure will just display the SVG as text (which could be useful for debugging more complex measures)

If you want to see a working example you can download an example pbix file from my OneDrive.

This was all relatively simple to do since I’ve worked with SVG before so it was not too hard to pull together something simple like this. The biggest problem that I had though was that Power BI restricts ImageUrl’s to only display inside a square, where as to build a nice custom data bar or sparkline using this technique you really want to work in a rectangular space that is 3-4 times wider than it is high.

So I’ve actually added and idea here to ideas.powerbi.com requesting that they change this in Power BI. Please vote for this if you think this would be a good idea.

Extending the Analysis Services Command Timeout in Power BI

October 17, 2019 / / 2 Comments

There was a question recently in the Power BI forums on how to extend the timeout for a connection to Analysis Services used to import data into Power BI. In other tools you can add a setting like “Timeout=600” to the connection string to extend this timeout, but the Analysis Services connector in Power BI does not expose a way to set the raw connection string.

image

However if you look at the Source step in PowerQuery you’ll see that it calls the AnalysisServices.Database() function and if you check the documentation for this function you will see the following

CommandTimeout : A duration which controls how long the server-side query is allowed to run before it is canceled. The default value is driver-dependent.

So based on the above information my first attempt was to change the call to this function as follows, however this just resulted in an error:

image

This caused a fair bit of head scratching, but if you re-read the documentation carefully you’ll notice the following “CommandTimeout : A duration …”  and a duration is a specific data type in the M language which you can instantiate using the #duration( <days>, <hours>, <minutes>, <seconds>) constructor.

So changing the CommandTimeout option to the following fixes this issue and has the added benefit of being clearer that the timeout is now 5 minutes (when using the connection string parameter its never completely clear what the units of the timeout are)

= AnalysisServices.Databases(“localhost\tab17″, [TypedMeasureColumns=true, Implementation=”2.0”, CommandTimeout=#duration(0,0,5,0)])

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