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jdunmall's avatar
jdunmall
Icon for Advocate I rankAdvocate I
10 years ago

Data Privacy Broken: We cannot convert the value "[Record]" to type Record

Hi all,   Some general comments after pursuing a case with Microsoft that took about 8 weeks to resolve. Hopefully this is helpful to someone else. Here is what I've learned:   1. Data Privacy in...
Tips and Tricks
maghan's avatar
maghan
Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
10 years ago

When you combine data from two sources, there’s a risk of leaking data from one source to the other. To let the user, control this, implemented is a “data privacy” feature which lets you control this data flow by classifying sources as “private”, “public” or “organizational”. Data can flow public -> any and organizational -> organizational, but in no other directions. At runtime, we partition a user query based on these classifications, and we insert explicit steps on the partition boundaries.

 

The Power BI service decides to simplify things by not asking to assign a privacy classification to each source. Instead, it just marks them all as “private”. This means that a query which combines (say) “CRM” and “SharePoint” data gets partitioned in the way described, and the data from “CRM” gets buffered before merging it with the “SharePoint” data.

 

However, in most cases there are a couple of things you can do from the service side via the gateways. With the Personal Gateway you can choose the “fast combine” option, and the On-Premises Data Gateway allows you to define the privacy level for a data source. This is used for scheduled refresh.

armyguy255a's avatar
armyguy255a
Regular Visitor
7 years ago

Mark,

Thanks for the help! This absolutely solved my issue. I was having a similar issue except it was happening to Tables instead of Records. I shuffled my Table.ExpandTableColumn and Table.ExpandRecordColumn statements directly under the source and it solved my issue. See below.

 

let
    Source = OData.Feed(url...),
    #"Expanded Links" = Table.ExpandTableColumn(Source, "Links", {"SourceWorkItemId", "TargetWorkItemId", "LinkTypeName", "TargetWorkItem"}, {"Links.SourceWorkItemId", "Links.TargetWorkItemId", "Links.LinkTypeName", "Links.TargetWorkItem"}),
    #"Expanded Links.TargetWorkItem" = Table.ExpandRecordColumn(#"Expanded Links", "Links.TargetWorkItem", {"WorkItemId", "Title", "WorkItemType", "State"}, {"Links.TargetWorkItem.WorkItemId", "Links.TargetWorkItem.Title", "Links.TargetWorkItem.WorkItemType", "Links.TargetWorkItem.State"}),
    ...
    ...
    ...
in
    #"Removed Columns"

 

Phil Dieppa

Microsoft TWI Fellow

United States Army, CW3

  • chaz2jerry's avatar
    chaz2jerry
    Icon for Advocate IV rankAdvocate IV
    6 years ago

    Thanks everyone, I have similar error and this fixed it for me.