Merge Files On Demand in PowerBI

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am moving from another BI tool to PowerBI and I am trying to replicate/meet the functionality of the other tool. We were using a somewhat "merge data on demand tool" so any user could upload their "merge file" and that would be merge with the central data source. That "merge file" would need to contain 1 of the 3 keys to merge back to the central data source. Users would then filter on some characteristics from the central data source and export their merge file.

I am trying to mimic something somewhat similar in PowerBI but I'm not sure the best way to approach it. Possibly each file is a new table in the dataset but I'm not sure how I can pre-create relationships between tables that don't exist yet? Or I could try to merge them all into one table but the headers of the files are going to be different?

Any suggestions for how to tackle this problem or slightly adjust my process to meet the end goal of users being able to on-demand combine/filter their data in PowerBI? (I understand other tools might do this better but I want to try to achieve in PowerBI first)

Thanks in advance for the help!

[Greg_Deckler]

Not sure if this will help or not but I wrote this article a while back:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/32915.power-bi-merge-query-with-m.aspx

Might give you some ideas. I'll think some more on this topic. I'm wondering if perhaps you could pre-create your main tables and then your merge tables and use functions like NATURALLEFTOUTERJOIN to create a "final" table. This would all be pre-created so the user would only have to point the query for the "merge" table to their data and presto!