Calling web service from Power BI Desktop

[bebeto]

Hello,

I hace some files with location data (latitude, longitude) in them. In my multidimensional solution, when I do the ETL with SSIS I have an script task which call a bing maps web service (https://msdn.microsoft.com/es-es/library/ff701710.aspx) passing latitude and longitude as parameters. The resulting data is added to my cube.

I want to do thse same in Power BI, can I do it?

[Greg_Deckler]

You might be able to get there with some fancy "M" coding:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/Mt253322?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

What is the purpose/use of the information? Is it to plot the location or is there some other information coming back? I tried your link. With my limited ability to read what I believe is Spanish, it looked like an error "page not found".

[bebeto]

The purpose is get information about the adress passing a point (latitude, longitude).

Here is the link:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/es-es/library/ff701710.aspx

[Greg_Deckler]

Another option might be to use R Script. File | Options and Settings | Options | R Script to enable.

[bebeto]

Using R or M I can call a web service passing parameters using data form my data model?

Any example?

[Greg_Deckler]

Haven't really played around with R in that context. M does have a category of functions called "Access data functions":

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt296615.aspx

There are a number of options and the specific answer is going to depend on the type of web service. You can definitely use M to build something like a web service URL using static text plus columns/fields from your data. So, I could imagine a custom column in the query that concatenated the appropriate URL per location and then an M function to grab the data and add it as custom colums to each row.

In general, Power BI typically is not used in this dynamic fashion but rather you connect to a data source, import the data and build the model. That being said, a very interesting use case here and would make a good blog article.

[bebeto]

Thanks for your ideas, smoupre!

If I get the solution I will post here anyway.