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]

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. 

[RuiRomanoMS]

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?

[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?

[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'

[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.

[AkhilAshok]

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

[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!

[RuiRomanoMS]

Can you please elaborate on what you mean by using "PBIP as theming environment"? 

[ChristopheB]

I downloaded a pbix-report from a workspace (live connection to the dataset).
When I save this report as pbip, and then re-open it, I always get an error that the model cannot be loaded. Even when I re-connect this report to the online dataset, it still gives the same error after re-opening.

Is it not possible to save a report as pbip when it has a live connection to a dataset? 

[RuiRomanoMS]

Looks like a bug, save as PBIP is supported for live connect report.
Can you please open a support ticket?