Forum Discussion

jPinhao's avatar
jPinhao
Icon for Advocate II rankAdvocate II
10 years ago
Solved

Flattening multiple related rows in Power Query

We are loading some JSON data, which holds some arrays with varying property-value pairs. Due to the JSON structure, once you start expanding the fields you end up with something along these lines: ...
  • jPinhao's avatar
    jPinhao
    9 years ago

    Thanks for the replies! I actually managed to solve this on my own in the end :)

     

    ImkeF - your solution is interesting, I'm guessing FillUp will find the bottom-most non-null value and fill any rows above with it? 

     

    My solution - wrote a function that will find and return the first non-null value in a list (or a default if all null), and use that as the aggregator. I then build a list from the original list of column names that will run the operation on each named column:

     

    //FirstNotNull
    let
        Source = (sourceList as list) =>
            let
                firstNotNull = List.First(List.RemoveNulls(sourceList), "Not Applicable")
            in
                firstNotNull
    in
        Source
    
    //DynamicTableGroupColumns
    let
        Source = (sourceTable as table, columns as list, aggregateFunction as function) =>
            let
                result = List.Transform(columns, each 
                                                // build lists with {columnName, aggregateFunction}
                                                let
                                                    //save current _ (column name) to use in next each statement
                                                    columnName = _,
                                                    columnToFunctionList =  {columnName, each 
                                                                                //_ will be the grouping table as it's called by Table.Group
                                                                                aggregateFunction(Table.Column(_, columnName))}
                                                in
                                                    columnToFunctionList)
            in
                result
    in
        Source
    
    //DynamicTableGroup
    let
        Source = (sourceTable as table, groupBy as list, columns as list, aggregateFunction as function) =>
            let 
                result = Table.Group(sourceTable , groupBy, DynamicTableGroupColumns(sourceTable, columns, aggregateFunction))
            in
                result
    in
        Source

     

    Any comments on one method being better than the other? Will your method of FillUp into a single column and then expanding the relevant fields be more performant that preparing a list of lists to feed to Table.Group?

     

    EDIT: ImkeF just timed the 2 queries, and filling up into one column and then expanding seemed to take 2min20s, while my approach took 58s! Yesterday I had also timed doing an unpivot/pivot over all columns, and that was taking about 1min45s. I'm not sure how the unpivot/pivot scales with more columns and rows, but I'd assume our 2 methods would scale similarly. 

     

    Feel free to use the set of functions I put up in case you find use for them to speed up any queries! Or let me know if don't see similar results :)