TMSL Alter Column Description

[olegkazanskyi]

I am a noob in TMSL and I need your help.

I am trying to add a description to the column in Power BI Services with a command:

{
"alter ": {
"object": {
"database": "dataset_test",
"table": "005_SHIP_TO_LOCATIONS",
"column":"CREATION_DATE"
},
"column": {
"name": "CREATION_DATE",
"description":"This is the new description"
}
}
}

The error I get is:

Unrecognized command: alter . Check path '['alter ']', line 2, position 13.

Could you help me to make it work?

This is Power BI Premium and I TMSL works for table name modification, but I can't figure out how to change the column description.

[d_gosbell]

The ALTER command only works with the objects listed in the documentation listed here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/analysis-services/tmsl/alter-command-tmsl?view=asallproducts-allver... 

(Database, DataSource, Table, Partition and Role)

If you want to alter the description on a column you would actually have to specify the entire columns collection and all the properties for all the columns.

For this reason I would not use TMSL to alter a column description. I would either use something like Tabular Editor or if you want to script this you could use PowerShell or C# with the TOM library (which is part of the AMO download here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/analysis-services/client-libraries?view=asallproducts-allversions ) and a version of this is usually on your machine if you have the SQL client tools installed.