Incremental Refresh when Date field is a YYYYMMDD string

[Eric]

My sales fact table ('TMSDAY') stores the transaction date [TDDATE] as an 8 character string in YYYYMMDD format.  Our ERP system stores all date fields this way so I am facing this issue with every fact table.

My dataflow is setup and working properly and I'm now trying to setup a nightly incremental refresh for this table in Power BI Premium.  But, PowerBI doesn't recongnize the [TDDATE] field as a date so it's not giving me the option to create an incremental refresh routine. 

Has anyone faced this challange and found a successful way to overcome it?

Thanks,

Eric

[v-diye-msft]

Hi @Eric 

Please refer to the similar solved post:

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Incremental-refresh-with-ID-YYYYMMDD/m-p/437844

[Eric]

v-diye-msft, thank you for the response.  I looked at taht post but it doesn't solve my problem.  I am able to use that approach in Power BI Desktop but I’m trying to do this in a Dataflow, which to my knowledge doesn’t have the ability to create and use Parameters.  If I’m wrong on that front, please correct me.

Any idea how to accomplisy this same thing in Dataflows?