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PetrusJKruger's avatar
PetrusJKruger
Frequent Visitor
8 years ago

Workaround powerbi.com Requirement for Static URL in Web.Contents() Function

Good day, Background I'm trying to access our database through a Web Datasource. To query the database, I must the URL in the form of   http://<server>:[<port>]/query/<database>/<language>/<q...
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v-jiascu-msft's avatar
v-jiascu-msft
Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
8 years ago

Hi PetrusJKruger,

 

What's the web data source? Can you create a view in the database? Then you can use the simple query like this: "SELECT name FROM VIEW".

 

Best Regards,

Dale

PetrusJKruger's avatar
PetrusJKruger
Frequent Visitor
8 years ago

Hi v-jiascu-msft,

Thanks for coming back to me.

The websource is a OrientDB managed database, which allows access through a RESTful HTTP protocol.

I'm unfortunately not familiar with what you mean by 'view' of the database - I'm very much learning as I go along. Perhaps I'm not answering your question, but I'll attempt to.

I suspect that 

http://<server>:[<port>]/query/<database>/<language>/<query-text>[/<limit>]

is how you access the 'view'. Because it is an HTTP request the URL needs to be encoded from

 

"SELECT name FROM VIEW" to "SELECT%20name%20FROM%20VIEW"

I can work around that manually without the Uri.EscapeDataString() function. However, now I need to add a WHERE clause that changes dynamically and still use no functions like Date.ToText(max_historic_date). Then I need to append that to become part of the <query-text>, hoping that using & to concatenate will still allow powerbi.com to perform its static web source test.

I hope that helps, v-jiascu-msft.

Kind regards,