Lastnonblank problem

[jruskinparks]

Hi All.

I have a table in my database called UserRights that has a "role" column and a "department" column (among others). I wrote a measure as follows:

LastDepartment = LASTNONBLANK(SELECTCOLUMNS(Filter(UserRights,UserRights[role]<>"Employee"),"Department",UserRights[department]),1)

Now I'm getting an error "The expression refers to multiple columns. Multiple columns cannot be converted to a scalar value."

I'm a little confounded by this as this expression worked just fine until the most recent update of PowerBI desktop (no idea what that could have changed). Further, the SelectColumns statement by itself works as a way to define a table.

Thanks for any help.

[aviral]

It took some time for me to realize that the probelm was

being caused by SELECTCOLUMNS() and not LastNonBlank.

I found the last month's installer of PowerBI in downloads folder.

Identified it by the last modification date.

Uninstalled the current month's (August-2017) app and

reinstalled the one from last month.  

The dataset refreshed successfully. 

I think they will have to release an earlier update to fix this. 

Just thinking aloud. Is using SELECTCOLUMNS() a bad practice? 

I there any other preferable way to get

a list of scalers from a column after filtering it?  

[Greg_Deckler]

Not sure about a violoation of best practice but you could also consider creating another table in your model and selecting out the columns that you need and removing the others in the query.

I've never actually found a reason for using SELECTCOLUMNS as that's sort of what visuals are for in my opinion but I suppose its there for a reason but I would be interested in what the actual use case is.

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

There was an earlier thread around something similar with SELECTCOLUMNS and I believe that it was flagged as a bug. Try searching for it in the forums. It may have been posted to the Ideas or Issues forums as well.

Found the threads:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Issues/SELECTCOLUMNS-select-only-one-column-doesnt-work-anymore-wit...

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Issues/DAX-SELECTCOLUMNS-function-works-in-desktop-but-fails-on-web...

May not be the same issue, but sounds like there is something up in general with the SELECTCOLUMNS statement recently.