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RuiRomanoMS
Microsoft Employee
Microsoft Employee

Share your thoughts on Power BI Project files (PBIP) and Fabric Git Integration

Hit Reply to tell us about your experience with Power BI Project files (PBIP) and Fabric Git Integration for Power BI Semantic Models and Reports so we can continue to improve.

For example:

  • What changes would you like to see?
  • What are your main challenges/issues?
  • Any suggestions for additional settings or capabilities?

Thanks,

-Power BI team

61 REPLIES 61
Ferfren
New Member

Hello, we are a development team. Our workflow is as follows: we use the new .pbip project format in Git, with Azure DevOps, synchronized in a workspace called "Development." Then we use Deployment Pipelines to deploy to the test workspace and later to the production workspace.

We are encountering an issue where using then new format .pbip whit the Deployment pipelines, results in an error. This error does not provide any details; it only includes the GUIDs of the operation:

Thanks! 

We are working to provide more details in situations like these. 
In the meantime, please open a support ticket they can help provide more details into what is going on.

mike_honey
Memorable Member
Memorable Member

Tried the PBIR format but ran into the limitations about not being able to "Save As" back to PBIX or true PBIP format. This made the whole thing too much of a leap-of-faith for me - a one-way journey to a preview format.

For now went back to the PBIP format and was able to get what I needed done (copying pages) within the monster report.json file.

Are you referring to the "Save as Copy" in service limitation? If not, which limitation are you referring to? You should be able to convert between PBIP and PBIX with PBIR format.

WRT https://learn.microsoft.com/en-au/power-bi/developer/projects/projects-report#pbir-considerations-an...

  • Once a report is converted from PBIR-Legacy to PBIR, it isn't possible to roll it back.
  • Converting a PBIP file to a PBIX file using the "Save As" feature embeds the PBIR report within the PBIX file, carrying over all PBIR limitations to the PBIX.
Meagan
Super User
Super User

I'm getting an error when saving my PBIR format report after switching themes. The report started with a base theme, then I modified a couple of properties. That was all fine. Then I changed the theme by uploading a file from my local machine. The theme itself works fine. If I go to Customize Theme, I can see the updated theme is applied. But when I go to save the file, I get the error: 
Unable to save document
An error occurred while trying to save '<filepath>\Filename.pbip': Access to the path '<filepath>\<reportName>.Report\StaticResources\RegisteredResources' is denied. 

(The filepath and reportName values are filled in with actual values, I just replaced them with a placeholder in order to share this info.). 
I tried this in two versions: 2.137.952.0 64-bit (October 2024) and 2.138.828.0 64-bit (November 2024). I get the same error in both versions. 

Thanks Meagan, can you share a step by step repro into this? Following your instructions above I'm not able to repro and I should be missing some step.
Btw, you are not saving the PBIP into OneDrive location right?

Ah, I was saving to my desktop, but it was going through OneDrive instead of directly to the location. I moved it to my Downloads folder and am no longer having the issue. Thanks for pointing that out!

Yes, Onedrive does lock the files when syncing. I'll add a note to PBIP docs that saving PBIP to OneDrive can have these issues.

Argh! I had been having this issue as well: Everytime I deleted a visual or some other element and tried to save I got the "Access top path ... is denied" error and I had to manually delete the folder and then try saving again. I was happy to realize that my git repository was in a OneDrive location. 

So I moved my git repository to a regular folder in the C: drive and finally open the .pbip report again to make a change... but I still get the "Access to the path is denied" error. Any other thing I should check?

gtdoug
Frequent Visitor

My whole team is having this same issue now.  We moved to the C drive, but continue to have this problem of access to path is denied.  This is a complete deal-breaker for the PBIR format.

Thanks for reporting. I dont think this is related to PBIR but a bug that is making Desktop to lock the PBIP file. Can you please confirm that the error message only refereed to the pbip file?

Can you get me a consistent repro or does it happen randomly?

In my case the issue went away after a few days (maybe 2 or 3). It sort of stuck after the folder change (from OneDrive to C: drive) but at some point stopped happening and now I haven't seen the error for a long time. A colleague had the exact same thing happening. So I hope it solves for you too some days from now.

Maybe try to install Microsoft PowerToys (a lot of cool, free tools) and use File Locksmith to see what is locking it. When File Locksmith is toggled on, just Rclick file or folder and 'Unlock with File Locksmith'

Amm5061
New Member

Hi @RuiRomanoMS

 

I've been watching the git integration release and the updates to make Power BI files to be more collaboration friendly with a lot of eager anticipation. Unfortunately as a govcloud user, we see in the documentation that the git integration features are not supported on sovereign clouds at this time.  Any idea when that feature may make it over to us?

 

Thanks!

JakeDuddy
New Member

Love the feature, but ran into an issue with a bubble chart. Did a Fabric Item API deployment but got this error for this visual "Couldn't load the data for the visual" error. Converting to table shows and it showed all the data, also recreating the visual in the service was successful.

Figured out this was related to the same measure being referenced in both the tooltip and x-axis.

andyclap
Advocate III
Advocate III

Great to see this - while it's been a bit of a frustrating journey, I think you're on the right route with the new report serialization.

It's really helping me diff & merge changes from multiple contributors sensibly in git.

 

I submitted a survey feedback, but will repost here as I'd be interested in the team's feedback.

 

For me the main use-case is for branch & merge in git. A report should be easily diffable with cohesive file changes, i.e. at the page level. It might be because we have lots of filters on each page, but splitting every visual on each page out into a separate obscurely named subfolder + json file makes this a bit clumsy for my scenario, and doesn't work as nicely with diff+merge.

 

At the page level, is it possible to make a canonical folder name from the pages' names rather than use their IDs? The commit is very hard to navigate if you have no clue what each file/folder relates to.

 

The json also seems a bit verbose. Did you consider structuring so that the boiler plate for the majority single-value use-case is minimal. I see a lot of arrays of "property" elements representing properties and "literal" elements representing literals. Would it be practical to have a small string grammar for common references, especially [Source.Field]?

 

Thanks for the feedback!
We cannot easily use display names because those can be duplicated and have invalid file chars. But we let you rename those files/folders and Desktop preserves them. Power BI Desktop project report folder - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
We know its hard to identify to which file the visual object relates to, and we plan to show the name property in Power BI Desktop.
In the future we will make simplifications to the JSON structure, specially for literal elements.

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