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

[RuiRomanoMS]

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

[Meagan]

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!

[RuiRomanoMS]

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.

[ManuGP]

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]

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.

[RuiRomanoMS]

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?

[ManuGP]

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.

[UNIheve]

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'

[Willow0136]

File Locksmith doesn't return anything for me.
The visual folder is empty, and I can delete it manually, which then resolves the issue (unless there are multiple of those).

I've observed that the issue always occurs on empty visual folders - upon saving, PBID creates those and, presumably, attempts to writes data, but fails to do so.

Pausing or even closing OneDrive doesn't resolve the issue for me, but either removing those manually or creating a new save does, at least until the issue happens again, which can very well be a minute later upon the next save attempt.

I can imagine it has to do with OneDrive trying to sync the new folder immediately, thus blocking PBID from whathever it's trying to do at the same moment, but I'm not sure why the issue persists after OneDrive being closed.

[Amm5061]

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]

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.

[JakeDuddy]

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

[andyclap]

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]?

[RuiRomanoMS]

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.

[andyclap]

Thanks - naming things is hard! Being able to name visuals ourselves from the PBI editor is perfect. I hope with a finalized schema we can build cool tools like a general rename refactor for GUIDs -> generated names ourselves.

Having a place to do that for pages too would be awesome (then folder name can just reflect that).

Keep it up with the json polishing, there's quite a lot of AST stuff in there that gets very verbose - As mentioned a little DSL for that might be much easier to track changes ... looking at filters especially!

[AkhilAshok]

It seems Page Type "Tooltip" doesn't seem to be getting captured in page.json of PBIR. 

[RuiRomanoMS]

Thanks, looks like a bug.

[Devale1]

the bug it still there in the PBI Desktop November version. 

any updates on when this will be resolved?? 

[AkhilAshok]

This issue still appears to be unresolved in the October update. Could you provide an update on when this might be addressed? Thanks!

[Devale1]

Rui fixed it in the January 2025 desktop release!!

[ThePowerOfBI]

Hello

I like to see that I can use the PBIP file on my onedrive as it easier to share and more secure include versioning as well by SharePoint. In the moment, the PBIP file is not showing up for using it/open it...

I also like to test my PBIP I downloaded from Internet for scheme/design template.
And I like to have a better documentation for getting more the idea how I can use PBIP as theming environment.
Thanks in advance 😉

Cheers 

Michael

[andyclap]

If you like onedrive and sharepoint versioning ... wait to you see git!