In power query when you connect to a table in a dataflow there are no options to create or use a parameter for that dataflow. When connecting to SQL there is an option when setting up the connection to create a parameter but that doesn't exist for a dataflow. This means that it is a bit fidly requiring creation of a parameter seperately then amending the advanced editor M code.
Could we get an options cog on the navigation step that allows the easy creation of or reference to parameters for dataflows and workspaces.
These are essential as we are working with dataflows and deployment pipelines and often switch between dataflows for testing but setting them up n power query is arduous.
2 Comments
- miguel
Community Admin
Status changed:NewtoNeed ClarificationHi ben_holmes!
Thank you for sharing your feedback. Just to confirm, and to generalize the ask a bit more, would you say that your concrete feature ask is to be able to parameterize the selections when in a navigation screen?
You can definitely use any of the solution architectures mentioned below:CI/CD and ALM solution architectures for Dataflow Gen2 - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Some of them just inherently deal with CICD without you having to do any code rewrite or selecting any parameters or variables such as the Relative Reference. Perhaps adding relative references to the Dataflow connector would be enough for your case?
Thanks for responding.
For more context we have a gen 2 dataflow that many organisation power bi semantic models use. That dataflow sits in a workspace with a full deployment pipeline. In general when I start a semantic model build I start building on the PROD version of the dataflow. But there are many occasions when I need to switch to the dataflow in the test environment. Therefore, I want to publish my semantic model in a different deployment pipeline with parameter rules setup so that I can switch to test in the dev or test environment.
I think I would like to see an option in the get data process for a semantic model to setup parameters for Workspace and Dataflow ID. I would imagine this could be reduced to a tick box which auto generates the parameter in power query and amends the actual data query to use this parameter instead of a hardcoded ID.
I am not sure what you mean by navigation screen so I hope adding details on our use case makes sense.
Many Thanks
Ben Holmes
