Forum Discussion

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
6 years ago

PDF Viewer Help - PDF to Base64

Hello Community,

I am trying to use the PDF Viewer visual from the AppSource. It mentions that the PDF must be converted to Base64. I am trying to execute this in PowerQuery as a custom column using the below code.

 

Binary.ToText([Content],BinaryEncoding.Base64)

 

Where the "Content" column contains the Binary data for the PDF. It looks like the Base64 string is created, but the visual still does not work. 
Anyone with experinence with this app that could help?
Do I need to have a seperate file that is the Base64 dataset?
 
Thanks!
 
 
Need Help

6 Replies

  • sanimesa's avatar
    sanimesa
    Post Prodigy
    6 years ago

    Anonymous  I tried this visual and it worked as expected when I used python outside of Power BI to get the encoded string. Please check their documentation and examples.

    I'd assume something breaking when the binary import is being done, can you please describe your process?

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous
      Not applicable
      6 years ago

      sanimesa 

      Thanks for the response!

      I have a pdf file on my desktop, I am point to that in power query, then creating a custom column where I use the code mentioned in the original post to create the Base64 string.

      The string looks that same as when using other tools to create, but I can't get the visual to work. How would I integrate your Python method into what I'm doing?

      I have very limited Python experience.

       
       
       
      • sanimesa's avatar
        sanimesa
        Post Prodigy
        6 years ago

        Anonymous  Ok, your approach worked for me, so I suspect it may be due to limitation of the 30,000 characters. So, please follow their example and split up the text field further into multiple fields and see if it works.

  • met722's avatar
    met722
    Frequent Visitor
    6 years ago

    Anonymous so you were able to get that Power Query function to convert on the fly to base64? 

     

    I want to find a way to do this where it doesn't require manual work each time new PDFs are added to folder. 

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous
      Not applicable
      6 years ago

      met722 

      We have went with a different strategy that offered a bit more flexibility to searching the PDF pages. We created a .jpg image for each page and used that in our BI with the "Image" app from the AppSource.