Forum Discussion
Adding measure while using SSAS tabular datasource corrupt the whole report
I have updated to October version, still no luck. I have also tried using the Power BI Desktop regular version to see if the result was different, again no luck.
I really think that this is a serious bug. I have create a simple new tabular cube with only one measure
:
YTD Sales Amt:=
CALCULATE(
SUM(Sales[SalesAmount]),
FILTER(
ALL('Dates'),
Dates[CalendarYear]=MAX('Dates'[CalendarYear])
&& 'Dates'[FullDate] <= MAX('Dates'[FullDate])
)
)This measure works fine without any problem in Powerpivot and also Power BI. Then when I add a measure manually in Power BI while connected to my SSAS tabular cube :
Top 3 Category =
IF (
ISBLANK (
VAR Top3 =
RANKX ( ALL ( Products[Category] ), [YTD Sales Amt] )
RETURN
IF ( Top3 <= 3, Top3, BLANK () )
),
BLANK (),
[YTD Sales Amt]
)Again, it works fine. But when I change my slicer value from 2017 to 2016, then one of the graph starts displaying (X) can't display the visual. If I remove the measure I manually added, I still see this (X) even on the graph (Card) where I only show the YTD amount. It simply doesn't make any sense :(
We had a similar issue with a SSAS MultiDimensional data source. Built to a set os visuals. then added a local measure. Local meausre wokred fine until you changed a slicer. Removing the local measure still left the visuals broken. Restarting PBI Desktop didn't seem to help. The original (un amended) PBIX still gave us an error.
We had to restart the SSAS MD service on the server to get the visuals to work again (it was all direct query node)
The best thing was we could open the same PBIX on two different machines, leave one unchanged, produce the crash on the second mahcine and the unchanged one would now give an error! That's how we figured out it was happening somewhere on the SSAS MD server.
We tried to work up a repro but got pushed onto other work before we could get something concrete submitted to MS.
Thanks for your reply. It doesn't really fix my problem but at least I know that I'm not crazy :-)
Therefore, we will avoid adding manual measures in Power BI report on top of a cube for now :(
Cheers
HI Dars,
I might be misunderstanding but I think the problem is because you are using a SSAS Tabular datamodel, not a local PBI datamodel. Thus you need to add the measures to the remote SSAS data model. Same for SSAS MD I would have thought?
If you have chosen the SSAS Tabular data connection my understanding is that the data is coming direct from SSAS, not being stored in the local PBIX, so not able to add measures or calculated columns in the local data model.
Anybody else agree / disagree?
Rob
The following article suggests that you can't add measures when using a Live connection.
However the following article says you can (section pulled out)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-analysis-services-tabular-data
Question: If I created a live connection, can I edit the model or query in Power BI Desktop?+
Answer: You can create report level measures in the Power BI Desktop, but all other query and modeling features are disabled when exploring live data.
This second version is why PBI Desktop allows you to add measures in a Live connected report, though the table page and data model are hidden. Shoing the Data model would be crazy useful, as would sample data. Why these aren't shown in a READ ONLY mode I'm not sure, they are inherently there in the backend, they're just obviosuly not being passed to what is now a dumb client app! It's just that as these measures get more complex (changing the context for example) they seem to cause issues on the SSAS backend. Like behaving badly as described above.
Like many early versions of MS software its a bit rough around the edges...