Mere existence of a Calculation Group causes Smart Narrative with Measure to stop working

[edhans]

There appears to be a bug with using Measures in Smart Narratives and the mere existence of a calculation group.

See PBIX file.

There are two calculation items in the Sales Doubler calc group, one is SELECTEDMEASURE() and the other is SELECTEDMEASURE() * 2. 

The calculation group is not applied in this mode. It just exists. If I change the Sales Doubler item to just SELECTEDMEASURE() as well, the smart narrative works, but if it is anything except SELECTEDMEASURE() it returns blank, even though the card works. 

I know that by applying the CG will cause an error because you cannot multiply text * 2, but that isn't the issue. I can control that with ISSELECTEDMEASURE() or by using the CG in a slicer then editing the interactions to exclude the card and Smart Narrative, but I cannot even get that far. Doing that does not restore the smart narrative. 

This seems to be a relatively new issue. I do not recall seeing this in the past few months, and I make extensive use of measures in Smart Narratives to return the text I want.

[edhans]

If you have a model that exhibits this behavior and are having trouble finding the measure(s) causing it, do this:

1. Fire up DAX Studio and make sure it is connected to the model in question.
2. Run the following query
   1. select * from $SYSTEM.MDSCHEMA_MEASURES where DATA_TYPE=12
3. That will give a list of all measures that return a Variant data type, which I think is 12. I am not 100% on that, but I created a measure that specifically returned variant, and DAX Studio returned 12, so I'm going with it.
4. Ignore the [_Default measure]. Every model has that.
5. Fix your other measures so they return anything but Variant.

[molegris]

@edhans ,

How would you "Fix your other measures so they return anything but Variant"?  

In the measure below, the field Cohorte[Numero] as a datatype = Integer / Whole Number (int64).

Yet, according to Tabular Editor, the expression below returns a Variant

All my measures became Variant when I added a 4th CalculationGroup to my model.  I cannot identify what is in this particular CG that wasn't in the other 3 but I'm sure this was the moment when the model BROKE.  

Regards,

--mo

[edhans]

That is part of the issue @molegris - sometimes the CG causes a regular measure to return a variant, and I've not been able to track down is it because there is another measure in the model that can do that, or what the exact issue is. So my troubleshooting steps above are helpful, but not guaranteed to solve the issue. I've had to stop using smart narratives in some of my models and use the 3rd party visual Enlighten Data Story.

[lasersharks]

I experience this issue today and it was very frustrating to track down. Is there any update on a fix?

[KG_3243550]

I ran into this issue recently with a report that had multiple text boxes referencing a text measure. The dynamic values stopped displaying right after I added a calculation group to the dataset. I ended up moving the text in each text box to a measure and replacing them with cards as a workaround. I hope this is fixed soon as we use calculation groups quite a lot and don't want to have to choose between them and Smart Narrative.