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marclelijveld / External-Tools-Model-Documentation

This repository includes everything that is needed in order to run the External Tools capability in Power BI Desktop and generate Model Documentation.
https://data-marc.com/model-documenter/
MIT License
110 stars 42 forks source link

Add possibility to Document current model instead of new one #31

Open TomTimmerhout opened 2 years ago

TomTimmerhout commented 2 years ago

Hello Marc,

As discussed on your awesome website, please add the possibility to document the current open Power BI file instead of creating a new one.

marclelijveld commented 2 years ago

@TomTimmerhout, thanks for listing this issue.

Adding context from comments on blogpost

The generic idea is to put the documentation in the pbix from the data model. At this moment in time, this scenario is not possible because there is no way to script visuals etc. Also, the backend from the model documenter relies on a local export of the vpax file which is extracted at tool execution and not included in the data model itself. Using XMLA we could potentially add the tables to the current data model pbix, but it is not possible to add the data itself.

Also, refreshing of the data in the current setup is not supported in the Power BI Service due to the local vpax, which brings another challenge. I’ll keep this in mind, maybe things change in the future and it might be possible at some point.

chrisweis commented 2 years ago

"there is no way to script visuals"

Maybe partnership/integration with PBI-Tools could allow this to work (although unsupported by Microsoft)?