Forum Discussion

intrasight's avatar
intrasight
Helper IV
10 years ago

Google Analytics connector missing startdate/enddate parameters

  I thought this had been asked before, but I didn't find a thread via search. A GA connection has a query pattern like so: let Source = GoogleAnalytics.Accounts(), account = Source{[Id="6...
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pqian's avatar
pqian
Microsoft Employee
10 years ago

intrasight, interesting. I'm not very familier with GA's API, I can talk to the dev who worked on this. Particularly, I'm a bit surprised that the inclusion of Date dimension breaks the aggregation on GA.

 

PowerQuery's multidimensional model had limited support for additional parameters to the cube. We've only began adding it for SAP and AS. So for the GA connector, the start/end date parameter is automatically populated via the filter on date dimension. I think there's could be a bug in the PowerQuery folding logic, when the date dimension is collapsed, we should not have sent &dimension=ga:date.

 

I'll follow up on this and get back to you. 

  • intrasight's avatar
    intrasight
    Helper IV
    10 years ago

    It's the same reason that it would be wrong in MDX - you can't aggregate client-side. Have someone who knows MDX look at the GA integration and I'm sure they can straighten it out. Or have them contact me.

     

    I did see the additional parameters in SAP and AS, and thought "that's the solution".

     

    Thanks for investigating.

    • pqian's avatar
      pqian
      Microsoft Employee
      10 years ago

      Thanks for reporting the issue. We are now tracking this issue and will address it soon

    • tristanstcyr's avatar
      tristanstcyr
      Helper I
      10 years ago

      Hi,

       

      I agree that parameters would probably have been a better solution for this. We didn't have such a mechanism at the time and alas we went for the filter of the date dimension. Nonetheless, the approach we have today should work and before we go ahead and revise the design, I would like to understand what the problem is.

       

      We don't do any aggregations in Power Query for cubes. All the data that is shown comes back directly from the server. So this isn't the problem. Unless you import the data into Power BI for reporting, in which case measures are always aggregated locally, at the aggregation of the selected dimension attributes, because that's just what the thing does.

      When you say you are seeing the wrong number of the user metric.

       

      Are you seeing this number in the (Power) Query Editor or in Power BI reporting whiteboard?

       

      The two requests are likely for computing the previews on refresh for each step and not to compute a single result. If you look at both requests, the only different is that the date dimension is removed in the second one. That's because the first request is the one that is used to refresh the preview in the step before the last.

       

      Thanks,
      Tristan

       

      • intrasight's avatar
        intrasight
        Helper IV
        10 years ago

        All the details of the problem are in this thread. Again in summary, client-side aggregation is being done because of buggy query folding, and because GA is effectively a cube, you are thus giving wrong numbers. This is all just straight-up "M" at this point since obvioulsy I wouldn't move to the next step if the numbers are wrong. I'd be happy to do a web meeting with you next week to show the details. But you can do the same queries which were presented in this discussion thread.