Disabling Table Load Deletes Measures Stored in that Table

[tctrout]

I just learned the hard way that if you disable a load within PowerQuery that all the Measures 'stored' under that table will be deleted.

I wanted to ask the community if my understanding is correct or hopefully they are moved somewhere that is not apparent to me?

I often disable table loads in power query when troubleshooting refresh failures but this is the first time I witnessed this behavior.  I use to leverage DAX Table technique, where I would build a DAX Table via Calculated Table and stored all my measures there.  However, as I adopted more and more best practices for Fact Dim modeling (hiding native numeric columns to avoid implicit measures in favor of explicit measures) I found my Fact tables to be 'bare'.  So instead, started to create DAX Folder within the Fact the DAX is calculating.  

Wanted to collect the communities thoughts as I think this would be pretty common practice and how to avoid what I ran into.  

[tctrout]

Thank you for the detailed explanation and for the work arounds.  I leverage Tabular Editory 2 and was hopeful that I could simply drag my Measure folder to a new home table but it doesnt appear to be supported.  Selecting many measures and moving them is still better than losing them.  Thank you again.

[bcdobbs]

I've just tried in 2.16.5 and it let me drag and drop two measures at once. What version are you using?

[bcdobbs · Accepted solution]

Yes,

Your understanding is correct. Measures sit within the table section of the tabular object model which is the data layer in power bi:

When you tell power bi to not load a table it doesn't hide the table it moves it to an area of the object model called shared expressions which just contains the M code and none of the rest:

Some options:

1) You can move measures to another home table:

In PowerBi you can only move one at a time. However if you open your model in tabular editor you can drag and drop multiple.

2) You could duplicate your table for testing purposes and unload it but leave the M in the original commented out... effectively leaves a blank table.