Calculation Groups biggest contribution is to help us reduce the number of measures that we have to create and manage. However, sometimes, me might want measures again… Of course we can forgo the calc group altogether, but we might want to keep the centralized logic while having actual measures, and not measures + a filter as we usually do with calculation groups. The most relevant use case that comes to mind is when we do not want our calculation items to travel to the tooltip or drill through pages, as I discussed in this post not long ago. I guess that for most use cases, creating the measures manually is not the end of the world, but hey, scripting is fun and is cool, so let’s automate that a bit.
It’s a terrible title, but by the end I hope it makes sense
Today I had some spare time and I thought I would do some c# that is always good to keep your mind going. The goal was to create a script that given a base measure, you can then specify a column and a new measure will be generated for each diferent value of the column, in a pattern like CALCULATE([Base Measure], tbl[Column] = Value1 ) and the same for value2, 3 etc of that same column.
Referential what? it sounds weird, but it’s a rather basic thing: It’s like asking, do you have all the product IDs of the sales table in your product table? If you don’t, then is when that infamous «blank» appears in slicers and all kind of bad things start to happen. Unless you load everything from a pristine data warehouse, you should actively check these things, like after each refresh. It’s one of these things that you should do, but normally does not make it anywhere close to the top unless results look way off. If there was an easy way to check that…
Hello there, today I don’t have any new fancy use case for calculation groups or anything else, but rather a repository of links to the best of the best c# scripts… to create calculation groups. The main use of this post is to point people this way when I do a presentation on calculation groups, for example. Since they are «one-click» means you can just store it as Macro/Quick Action and even put it in a custom toolbar if you are using Tabular Editor 3 (which you should!). I’ll just start with two, but I plan adding more over time.
Is no secret that if you work daily with Power BI, you should be using Tabular Editor, but if you are working with lots of different datasets you probably feel like you are doing the same thing over and over again. Then it’s time to bit the bullet and get your hands dirty with Tabular Editor scripts. If you do, don’t start with a blank sheet. Always copy from someone and build from there (that’s what I did!) — there are lots of great scripts out there. Maybe not tons, but certainly lots.
But anyway, once you get going with Tabular Editor C# scripts (now we need to specify if we are talking c# or DAX scripts) you may feel that you are repeating code, and as in any kind of programming, that’s not just a waste of time, it’s bad practice. So, today I’ll share how I’m starting to move my scripting to the next level, creating a custom DLL for Tabular Editor C# Scripts (never did that before!) and making use of intellisense by moving development (or at least the bulk of code typing) to Visual studio.
I’ve seen it many times. While there is a set of «official» attributes for a product, or a client or whatever, a department may choose to group them through one or more custom attributes. And what do they do? Of course, they create an excel file where they manually maintain a table with the key (hopefully) and all the custom columns. They will tell you that they update it whenever a new value appears in the datasource, but if you double check this statement you might get let’s say «mixed results» at best.
Nothing says «there is a problem» as a red button appearing in your report. And if it offers «actionable insight» on how to solve the problem, so much better. So this is what we’re going to do: A data problem button.