Merge Issue: Expression.Error: We cannot convert the value "[Binary]" to type Binary.

[mnm100]

Hi everyone,

I am working on a dataflow and have the following issue:

First, I load a list of Excel files from a SharePoint and have a second data source which contains metadata for those files. I would like to merge the two tables, filter by a metadata parameter and combine the files I get after the filtering. 

The problem ist that after the merge the binaries (see screenshot below) are damaged and showing the error "Expression.Error: We cannot convert the value "[Binary]" to type Binary."

Do you have any ideas how I can fix this?

Thank you! 🙂

[mnm100 · Accepted solution]

@StefanoGrimaldi Thank you for your answer!

I am aware of the combine files functions and thought of using it for combining the Excel files. But I don't want to combine all of the files and filter based on the metadata. For that I need to merge the SharePoint file list with another table. And that destroys the "Content" column (as described above).

Any ideas how to fix this? 🙂

[StefanoGrimaldi]

thats because the content column isnt a data column, so there no data to combine or upload to the model, you need to extract first the data from thos binary column and them you can do any combination with others sources. 

[StefanoGrimaldi]

basically you will need to combine the excel files first, them add the sharepoint list content and them filter out the data for your final query, (all that need calculated tables on dataflows thats a primium capacity)

[StefanoGrimaldi]

you cant combine directly the binary type files in 1, practically thats no data thats a file type to get data from, here you can use the combine files functions, it will get the files from a specific folder (you can filter the files you dont want to be merge in this process in the final query) this will allow to use a file as example to do the tranformation and run a function that will apply that tranformation to all files and merge them in 1. 

keep in mind this its a premiun function for dataflow (can be done with normal licences on desktop) but for dataflows you need prim cap or ppu licence