Middleware datatype unrecognized when replicating SQL tables

[srpeters]

Hello,

The data for my reports are coming from a secondary SQL database. We are replicating a portion of a much larger database to this secondary one for these reports. The issue we have run into is that we have middleware from a third-party company that is using their own data types. One of these data types is not recognized and is causing the replication to break with an "Illegal characters in path" error message. The datatype is a 'UserDefinedDatatype'. Without breaking everything that is using this middlewares' data type, is there anything we can do to resolve this so that we can replicate from that first SQL database to our Power Bi SQL database? Could we convert the type to one that SQL recognizes when replicating without changing the original database? 
 
Any suggestions are appreciated, thank you in advance. 

[lbendlin]

What is the content?  Binary, plain text, JSON, XML, EDI?

[srpeters]

@lbendlin As far as I am aware it is a SQL user defined date field, so I am assuming its plain text in a dd/mm/yyyy format. The original SQL table has entries for this datatype but the issue is when we are trying to replicate it to a different server. 

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

You could consider using a view at the source to convert it into a more standard type,  or to consume it in Power BI as binary, then convert to text, and then parse as needed.