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GQ00's avatar
GQ00
Helper III
2 months ago
Solved

Efficient development with lean reports and huge Semantic Model

We currently have a semantic model (import mode) with incremental refresh in the cloud and build lean reports on top of it. The end result is that when editing the SM one needs to open PBIX-base e...
Need Help
  • v-abhinavmu's avatar
    v-abhinavmu
    2 months ago

    Hi GQ00,

    Thanks for the update, and I'm glad to hear the deployment is now working.

     

    Deployment pipelines maintain connections between dependent items through Autobinding. For Autobinding to succeed:

    • The semantic model that the report depends on must exist in the corresponding target stage.
    • If the dependent semantic model isn't present in the target stage, the deployment fails. In such cases, you can use Select related to deploy all dependent items together.
    • You can also use View lineage to verify that the report is connected to the expected semantic model before deployment.

    For more information, please refer to the following documentation:
    The Microsoft Fabric deployment pipelines process - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

     

    If you continue to experience the issue after verifying these points, please let us know and we'll be happy to assist further.

     

    Thank you.

Shai_Karmani's avatar
Shai_Karmani
Super User
2 months ago

Hi GQ00,

The path you are leaning toward is the right one. The cleanest move is to convert your PBIX-base to PBIP (File > Save As > .pbip), commit the resulting .SemanticModel and .Report folders to a Fabric workspace via Git integration, and from there edit the model as TMDL in VS Code or Tabular Editor instead of clicking around in Desktop. Your incremental refresh policy is preserved inside the TMDL definition, so going to PBIP does not break the partitioning logic.

For deployment, drop ALM Toolkit in favor of either Fabric Git integration plus deployment pipelines (dev to test to prod), or Microsoft's open source fabric-cicd Python library if you want full CI/CD from Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions. Thin reports stay as separate .Report folders next to the model, so report devs can iterate without touching the model.

A few small gotchas: turn on the PBIP and TMDL preview features in Power BI Desktop options before saving, and once you are on PBIP, the web modeling view becomes much more useful for quick edits since you can pull those changes back into Git too.

 

If this helped, a thumbs up and accepting the solution would be appreciated.

 

Best,
Shai Karmani

 

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  • GQ00's avatar
    GQ00
    Helper III
    2 months ago

    hi Shai_Karmani , thanks for your answer very useful

     

    I managed to some things going , but now when syncing from repo to bi service , the services seems to be editing the connection string automatically 

     

    seems that the service replies on a relative file path (begging the source connecting with Dot dot ) while my local file is connected to the bi semantic model in Dev workspace 

     

    deployment pipelines map this correctly auto binding works ( thanks to help of parry2k ) but the issue remains 

     

    fabric modified the data source of the report , flagged as changed for cicd 

     

    has anyone experienced this ? how do you work around it?