Introduce Native Interactive Data Dictionary Visual/Explorer for Power BI Semantic Models
Business Problem: Understanding semantic model structure (tables, columns, measures, relationships, and their descriptions) is crucial for both report developers and business users. While the new INFO.VIEW DAX functions allow programmatic access to this metadata, creating a user-friendly, interactive data dictionary report still requires manual DAX structuring and report design effort. This can be a barrier to widespread adoption and consistent presentation of model documentation across an organization.
Proposed Solution: Introduce a native, interactive "Data Dictionary Explorer" visual or feature within Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service. Key Capabilities:
- Automatic Generation: Connects to a selected Semantic Model and automatically ingests and displays metadata (potentially leveraging INFO.VIEW functions behind the scenes).
- Interactive Exploration: Offers built-in search, filtering (by object type, name, description keywords), and sorting capabilities.
- Clear Presentation: Provides a clean, pre-formatted layout for tables, columns (with data types, descriptions), measures (with DAX expressions, descriptions), and relationships (ideally with a simple graphical representation).
- Customization (Optional): Allow basic branding or selection of fields to display.
- Accessibility: Easily embeddable in Power BI reports or accessible as a standard feature when exploring a semantic model in the Service.
Benefit: This would significantly reduce the effort to create and maintain data dictionaries, promote better model understanding across users, ensure consistency, and encourage developers to thoroughly document their models knowing it will be easily accessible and well-presented.
