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mbbozzuto's avatar
mbbozzuto
Icon for Advocate II rankAdvocate II
4 years ago
Solved

Source Code Control management for Power BI reports

We are using the Power BI premium per user in our enterprise and we have multiple reports in the Power BI Service ecosystem.  Since we have multiple users can step in to create or edit reports, manag...
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mbbozzuto's avatar
mbbozzuto
Icon for Advocate II rankAdvocate II
4 years ago

ImkeF wow, this tool looks amazing!  I went through the tutorial and it seems to be hitting on exactly what I am looking for.  I still want to do some more testing, particularly on reports that are isolated from the data model, but the way it extracts the report configurations into JSON that can then be source controlled is what I was looking for.

 

NOTE: in the tutorial, I went through the steps and got to the point where I tried to re-hydrate the compiled .pbit file but it threw an error trying to connect to the data source saying a connection could not be made: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pbi-tools/adventureworksdw2020-pbix/main/data/

 

I also tried the link directly entered into a browser and it also threw a 400 error; is that data still hosted at that link?

 

QUESTIONS:

  1. When editing the .pbit in Power BI Desktop after compiling it from JSON source, will any modifications to the report be saved back to the JSON report files in the extracted file structure, or will I need to always go back through the 'pbi-tools extract' command to convert the PBIX/PBIT file to a new file structure that can be committed back to source control (GitHub)?
  2. Related to the last question, will the 'pbi-tools extract' command overwrite all contents of an existing directory so that I can save edits to a PBIX to an existing directory that is connected to a Github repo?
  3. Does 'pbi-tools extract' command only work on a .PBIX file or will it also work on a .PBIT?

 

Danke!

ImkeF's avatar
ImkeF
Icon for Community Champion rankCommunity Champion
4 years ago

Hi mbbozzuto ,
strange that the re-hydration didn't work. I'm attaching the pbit (in zip-format) and pbix referencing that folder.
And although you cannot open that path in an ordinary internet browser, you will find them under this path there instead: adventureworksdw2020-pbix/data at main · pbi-tools/adventureworksdw2020-pbix (github.com)

Re your other questions:

1) Yes, if you run pbi-tools in watch-mode, everytime you click save in PBI Desktop, the folder structure will be saved.
2) Yes, it will overwrite in git, but keep the change history, like git does for version control

3) You can also use it on pbit-files, just check folder structure, there is one hierarchy-level missing.

Please check out this video that gives a very good intro to the tool: (1) PBI Tools: Source Control for PBI - Des Moines Power BI UG - YouTube