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restlessmodem's avatar
restlessmodem
Frequent Visitor
4 years ago
Solved

Rename columns in dataset without breaking all deployed reports

Hey everyone,   we have come to the situation of wanting to rename some columns in our reports for clarity reasons and also replace some raw numbers with measures, so we can add logic to them. Howe...
Need Help
  • AlexisOlson's avatar
    AlexisOlson
    4 years ago

    This should be possible with pbi-tools.

     

    TL;DR from here https://data-goblins.com/power-bi/replace-report-measures

     

    1. Download pbi-tools desktop CLI and make sure it’s in your path env variables

    2. Decompile your .pbix using pbi-tools extract, referring to the pbix path

    3. In the pbi-tools output, either programmatically or manually replace the field & table references in the broken visuals .json files. For each visual, you must loop through the key/value pairs that refer to tables, fields, or both.

    4. Recompile your .pbix using pbi-tools compile, referring to the path of the pbix output folder

    5. Reopen your .pbix file to confirm that the changes are done.
      You may need to do some testing if you have complex visuals with a lot of formatting, to make sure you cover the necessary keys and don’t mistakenly replace other text that you didn’t intend.

Kevin-Warne's avatar
Kevin-Warne
Regular Visitor
3 years ago

Have come across exactly this problem. If you create a column with exactly the same spec as the one to be renamed, but give it the new name you won't break any reports. Then in the cloud you will still have to manually replace the old one (where it is used) with the new one - a manual but safe process!