Binding an Existing Report to Direct Lake

[PeterMc]

I have been been building Power Bi report using excel & csv files stored on a local drive but because of the increasing size of the models and a wish to improve overall efficiency  I have started moving my projects into Fabric Lake Houses and Warehouses. My existing reports work well so I obviously don't want to rebuild them from scratch. So having brought the data into Lake House tables I have created new semantic models in the workspaces which are defaulting to DirectLake. My question is how do I connect the existing reports to the new DirectLake sematic model so I don't have to rebuild the reports. 

If anyone has had any experience with this or can point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Peter Mc

[danextian · Accepted solution]

Hi @PeterMc 

I havent done it myself but assuming that the direct lake semantic model has the same set of columns, data types, column names, measures and relationships as the one built in desktop,   you can delete all tables from the desktop and then connect to the  the direct lake semantic model. The method is similar to converting an existing report to live connection without downloading a live connection copy from the service.

[Fowmy · Accepted solution]

@PeterMc 

I have done a few import model migrations to Direct Lake to some of my clients.  I used the Symanticlink libraries to achieve that. the process is pretty easy as all functions are built into a notebook. Make sure your model is meeting the requirements prior to migration. 

Follow this link: https://github.com/microsoft/semantic-link-labs



 



 

[danextian · Accepted solution]

Hi @PeterMc 

I havent done it myself but assuming that the direct lake semantic model has the same set of columns, data types, column names, measures and relationships as the one built in desktop,   you can delete all tables from the desktop and then connect to the  the direct lake semantic model. The method is similar to converting an existing report to live connection without downloading a live connection copy from the service.

[PeterMc]

Hi Danextian

That worked - I saved my existing report under a different name (just with a _DL at the end) cut the table links to the old semantic model and then reconnected to the Direct Lake model. As you mentioned all the column and column names etc need to be the same and I was quickly able to pick out where they didn't match as the visualisation didn't work. 

Thanks

Peter Mc