Unwanted TMDL Data Type Updates in Power BI Reports

[miimii0608]

Hello everyone, my team uses TMDL for our PowerBI dataset as well as our reports. Whenever we make changes to a report or add a measure to a table in the dataset we get data type changes in other tables (or the table we are working on), even though we have not made these changes. Sometimes, changes like this appear even after simply opening a report and pressing save with no changes at all. Does this happen for anyone else? How can we stop this? We have tried to just commit the changes but it causes issues in the dataset and it just keeps appearing.

It makes developing quite tedious, especially when these random changes occur in files we have actually made changes in because then we need to revert the changes line by line.

[v-mengmli-msft]

Hi @miimii0608 ,

I recommend that you use Power Query to check your data type after Power BI loads the data. When Power BI loads data, it attempts to convert the data type of the source column to a more efficient storage and compute type. This automatic conversion may result in a change in data type. For example, if you import a value from Excel with a column that doesn't have a decimal value, Power BI Desktop converts the entire column of data to an integer data type, which better stores the integer.

To avoid this issue, we recommend that you manually check and adjust the data types in Power Query to ensure that they meet the expected model needs.

Best regards,

Mengmeng Li