Load external map files into R script

Panou · ‎10-04-2021

Hi,

I'm testing R visual in PowerBI (I'm a beginner in R). I use map files from an external direectoy which works fine in PowerBI Desktop. However, after uploading the report into PowerBI, I can't access my local files. Not sure how to access these files from PowerBI Service? Could I get them from OneDrive?

I set the files directory this way in my R code:

MapDir <-"C:/Tuna_dbs/R_Maps/"

And then access a .shp file :

fnam.eez.world.v11 <- "eez_boundaries_v11.shp"

Any help would be welcome.

Many thanks

Jsanua · ‎10-21-2021

If you're ok with using an R script as a query source , you could import the shapefile in an R query and convert the geometry into a well known text (wkt) column (using the sf package's st_as_text() function). This stores the geometry as plain text for each feature.

R Script Query example

library(sf)
shp <- st_read(shapefile)
shp$wkt <- st_as_text(shp$geometry)

When you're ready to do the visual, you can add that wkt column from the PowerBI table to your script visual and convert it back to a spatial format by using st_as_sf(). Make sure your wkt text column is both not summarized and Show items with Missing Data is checked.

Script Visual code to convert wkt column back to sf

library(sf)
dataset_sf <- st_as_sf(dataset, wkt = "wkt", crs = 4326)

I'm assuming your shapefile is WGS84 projection (SRID 4326), but set your CRS argument accordingly to the original projection.

Note that for scheduled refresh on the PowerBI service requires a personal gateway for queries using R scripts as sources.