Skip to main content
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Compete to become Power BI Data Viz World Champion! First round ends August 18th. Get started.

Reply
Danish_Bhat
Frequent Visitor

Query Folding

Do xml files have the capability of query folding?
I'm using data source as xml and have traced every step in query editor to check whether it has "view native query" enabled or not and it was greyed out in all steps.

4 REPLIES 4
mahoneypat
Microsoft Employee
Microsoft Employee

While your source hosting your XML files may not allow folding, you can still benefit from incremental refresh. Do your XML files have the date in the name? or is there a created/modified date? If in the name, you can parse it out and create a DateTime column, and do incremental refresh on that.

How you can incrementally refresh any Power BI data source (This example is a CSV File) - FourMoo | ...

 

Pat

 





Did I answer your question? Mark my post as a solution! Kudos are also appreciated!

To learn more about Power BI, follow me on Twitter or subscribe on YouTube.


@mahoneypa HoosierBI on YouTube


Danish_Bhat
Frequent Visitor

is there any other similar way of doing incremental refresh which would npt be based on query folding other than scheduled refresh?

XML is essentially a flat file. It's not like connecting to an engine that will support folding or incremental refresh (it's just a file; there's no engine at all). If you want your data to be able to do these things, you'll need to store it somewhere that does have a query engine (like a database or a SharePoint list).

Vijay_A_Verma
Super User
Super User

No. 

"Most data sources that have the concept of a query language support query folding. These data sources can include relational databases, OData feeds (including SharePoint lists), Exchange, and Active Directory. However, data sources like flat files, blobs, and web typically do not."

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/power-query-folding

Helpful resources

Announcements
August Power BI Update Carousel

Power BI Monthly Update - August 2025

Check out the August 2025 Power BI update to learn about new features.

August 2025 community update carousel

Fabric Community Update - August 2025

Find out what's new and trending in the Fabric community.

Top Solution Authors