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haassiej's avatar
haassiej
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6 years ago

Power BI dataflow: Add manifest option for CDM

Are there plans for Power BI dataflows to support manifest files in combination with the already supported model.json files? (Common Data Model)

 

Manifest is the new format for CDM entities in the new version of the Spark library.

 

Scala and Data Factory only support manifest files with the new Spark library to write to a target. ADF can read the model.json as source, but not as target.

 

The spark library cannot yet write a model.json. Quote from documentation: "Supports writing to CDM folders described by a manifest file only. Write support for model.json file is not planned."

 

Power BI dataflow only accepts model.json files from the older version or CDM.

 

For example the new provided functions for Dynamics 365 (Entity Stores to Data Lake and the coming feature Tables to Data Lake) generate model.json files instead of the manifest files. (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/data-entities/entity-store-data-lake)

 

So a combination of manifest and model.json would be ideal in Power BI data flows.