I've been using Dax to help me Document my Power BI file. Using Dax queries I've been able to record all the fields that exist in the file, including calculated and measured fields. In my documentation process I am also looking to find a way to record visualizations on the report - namely the charts and graphs. Unfortunately, no Dax query I've read about provides a list of data such as the visualization title, what fields it's using, or what kind of graph it is. Is there any Dax query that provides this information, as a whole or any part of it?
In addition to attempting to document with Dax I have also looked at the raw XML data in the Power BI file (For those who may not know, you can rename your Power BI file from .pbix to .zip and view the raw data). The relevant files within PBI are either XML or JSON. Looking at ../Report/Layout.JSON specifically I have seen JSON-formatted text that includes visualization data. Is there any easy way to extract this data and format it in a more-readable fashion?
For clarity, I do not need the contents of the tables, but I would like a way to record what fields are being used in the visualization, rather than what fields merely exist.
EDIT: I've found a workaround. It isn't efficient, and I would still appreciate any knowledge on this subject
I mentioned going through the the Layout file, renaming it to .JSON and poking it in Notepad++. I've found that you can ctrl+f for "displayName", "queryRef" and ""title\":show\":true,\"text\":\"". Break these all to new lines and indent them with tab (Use ctrl+h and replace with \n\t in notepad). These indent the JSON-formatted lines for Power BI pages, fields called by visualizations, and the visualization titles (if they have any), respectively.
Save this document as .csv and load it into Excel by delimiting on tabs. Use your preferred process - I prefer query editor - editor to remove the other non-indented rows. There still may be a lot of excess characters on the indented lines which need to be removed manually. At the end of this process, though, I ended with 3 columns in excel listing the aforementioned fields I've been looking for.
On a PBIX file with more than a dozen pages and several hundred dependent fields this process took about three hours. If there are any faster ways to do this, I would love to hear about them
As you have noted, DAX doesn't help you in this case because it will tell you about the model rather than the visuals on the report pages. The Layout file works, but you have to parse it for the information you need. You could probably just pull that JSON file into Power BI and process it there to get the info you want. There are also third party tools that can help with this. I just looked at https://app.datavizioner.com/ and it lists the ID of the visual, the type of visual, and each field used in the visual. It is currently free and just requires you to upload a PBIT of your report. It doesn't have the title of the visual that we see, so you would have to find a way to map the IDs you see to the human-friendly title of the visuals if you need that.
See http://radacad.com/power-bi-helper. It can tell you tables and columns in use. It also can export a list of all tables, columns, formulas, and roles in your model.
If you want stuff on the visualizations and how they are configured, Layout.json is the only way I know. The file does open nicely in Power Query if you were so inclined to try to make something of it.
My new Power BI comparer tool documents the whole Power BI file (pbit). The "CompareVisuals"-tab should provide you with all the information necessary.
It also superfast: Just fill in the path to the pbits (you can fill in the same path into both fields, if you don't want to compare, but just to analyze one file).
https://www.thebiccountant.com/2019/09/14/compare-power-bi-files-with-power-bi-comparer-tool/
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I have a word document currently used in a mail merge. My product owner wants it setup to use SSRS so we can take advantage of internally generated data in addition to the stock data our vendor's platform provides. The platform integrates with SSRS so options that are not SSRS are not available to me. I found this question but it's been inactive for 9 years and didn't get a lot of traffic and the linked blog post appears to be gone.
Using a Word document as a template for an SSRS report?
Is there any way to use the word doc as a template, or some kind of starting point in SSRS?
Unfortunately this is not possible without a lot of work. I had the same issue several years ago and ended up writing an application in C# to do all the work. This was not something that we could achieve in a few days.
Just in case you considered going that route, here are some of the issues you might face and what we did to get round them.
Font/Styles: We wanted to apply certain styles to sections such as the contents page, numeric tables, blocks of text. Within the SSRS report was an option to 'use tags' (via a report parameter). This allowed us to add tags that could be used to search/replace or style anything within them. The app would look for these tags style according to the template
Nested tables: Our reports were mainly tables of data interspersed with blocks of text. SSRS tries to gets things to physically align with what you see on screen so it tends to put everything in tables. This causes problems when you want to find blocks of text etc (as above) so I had to write a routine that would look for the innermost table and extract that. Sometimes this would select the wrong table such as if column are merged, SSRS will create yet another table to contain just that one piece of text so I had to add tags to the report to tell the app what to expect. All very messy.
The basic principle was to get SSRS to dump out a word file then our app would read thru it and extract the content, pasting it into a new document which was based on our Word Template.
If I had to repeat the process avoid doing what I did and I would concentrate on getting SSRS to output exactly what was required, matching the template design but this is only good if you don't have things like form fields etc as SSRS cannot produce these.
Word Automation is another option but that is slow or maybe look at some of the Apose renderers and see if they are of any use. ( https://www.aspose.com/ )
Sorry its not the answer you wanted but hopefully it will save you some time trying to figure it out.
Is there any good way to migrate existing database from Domino Server to Relational database like MySQL without using any tool.
I've explored a bit about this and got to know that its possible using XML but don't know how and what'll be the procedure.
Any help would be appreciated.
Without using any tool: NO.
There are two big difficulties in exporting data:
First is the Notes Richtext, which is a proprietary format that has to be "transcoded" somehow. This is not an easy thing to do "manually" and needs either a lot of coding or some kind of tool.
Second is the fact, that there is no "forced" structure in Notes documents. There can be several forms that "define" how the documents look and there can be different versions of these forms that have been used over the past. A document may or may not contain any number of fields in any thinkable type (the field may even be number in one document and text in the other).
You have to KNOW the structure of your documents to get them out. Of course you can simply export them as "Structured Text" or as "Comma separated values", to get -most- of it, but then you need views that show the documents in the order you need them. Exporting them as XML is another "standard" way to get the data, but then you need to understand the xml to get it into your relational database.
Short: Without (at least very little) coding knowledge OR a tool (that costs money) there is no chance for getting the data out.
Ah yes, there is an "ODBC driver" for Lotus Notes / Domino, but that will not help you much, if you do not know the structure of your documents and how Notes- Databases work, it will also not work.
As Torsten said above, you can't do it without a tool, either you buy one or write one yourself.
I wrote a tool like that several years ago to export Notes databases as XML. There is a bit of work, especially with the rich text fields. You also may want to export/detach attachments and embedded images.
You can read more about my export tool here: http://www.texasswede.com/websites/texasswede.nsf/Page/Notes%20XML%20Exporter
I have a huge MS Word file I use for personal notes but I want it to be more flexible. The file is made from short articles (600 words) with date, title, sometimes a table or some images. I came up with the idea of separating the single articles an put them in Access, to extract them from the database with queries, add tags, sort chronologically.
One big question is: which format should I use? I tried Access 2010 Rich Text Edit but it doesn't show tables, and I don't know where to store images. My idea is to store images outside the file.
Another thing I tried is to store the files as HTML in the database directory, but when I try to add some interface functionality I encounter problems with the most trivial things, like making VBA open the associated file. I don't like storing outside Access also because I don't have full-text search.
The primary requisite for this application is that it must not be cumbersome: it's a prototype I want to use to see if my model of storing notes works, so I don't want to spend a month programming an user interface, and if I note any defect at runtime I must be able to switch to design mode and fix it in minutes. If I want to write something, i don't have to worry about HTML syntax but I want to be able to add some simple table or image.
What I finally search is a HTML viewer in Access interface that receives an HTML string (composed by a query) and displays it.
At this moment I'm considering to remain with my MS Word file because switching seems too complex, although I don't like the sequentiality of articles and the hierarchy of chapters/subchapters, which made me think about this Idea.
The answer to all those problems was Evernote, which is like a Wiki you can edit quickly also from a smartphone, with or without an internet connection, which syncs to a master version on an Evernote server and without the constraint of having to invent a title for every page/idea.
If I had a huge Word document like yours, I'd probably split it into individual files and use something like dtSearch.
I have a 3rd party system a user uses which requires the user manually import new data when the user chooses. I have a view in MS SQL server that has the fields in the exact order that is wanted.
This 3rd party system needs the export file in a comma quote format. For this I want every single field surrounded with quotes and not just the ones that contain the field delimiter (a comma).
I have worked with the configuration files to try and customize how csv is exported. It seems the available options for the CSV renderer does not allow me to get to this format. I think? Am I making this more difficult than I need to? What do I need to do to get to a format like this?
Seeing as this report could be run without any parameters every time I am contemplating setting up a thing with Python, as I could accomplish exactly what I want in a very small number of lines of code. However, it would be nice if I could use SSRS as it takes away my need to figure out the delivery of the export file and is also a simple enough interface any user should be able to figure out how to use it.
Thanks.
MSSQL is a data source, to get data out of. Since you are simply looking for a way to extract data from the database, a python script to create the file exactly as you wish would be the simples explanation. K.I.S.S. :)
I have a commercial ColdFusion application, running on a MySQL database. A possible new client has approached me, they have been working in a Lotus Notes environment (and their own database) for many years now. Ofcourse they want to migrate their data to my application, before making the move.
I'm trying to get a grip on how to get a thorough feeling of the data, structure and interdependencies in their current database-application. Are there any tools to see a database-structure (like in a RDBMS) of a NSF-file, or is there anyway to dump the structure using ColdFusion etc....I don't have any handson experience with Lotus Notes (I do in the meanwhile have a local Lotus client and their database).
I need a good startingpoint to be able to determine whether or not I can find a way to migrate the data.
Any ideas??
thanks
Bart
To get at the data in Notes, a good option is to use NotesSQL which can be found here:
A quick overview of the Notes data structure is this: Notes is a document-centric database, with non-relational data contained within each document. Notes Databases (NSFs) contain any number of Notes Documents, which in turn contain any number of items that hold data. Each Notes Document can have a different set of items, and thus different data in it. While that sounds like a horrible mess, usually the documents have similar data based on the form used to create the documents.
This all leads to why there is no simple way to get data out of Lotus Notes. There are a few other options, which may or may not be useful depending on how much data you have to migrate.
I personally like using XML to extract data from Lotus Notes. You can do so by creating XML views within a Notes database. IBM has a tutorial that looks helpful.
Using Java or LotusScript, you can write code to extract data from the documents to any format you wish (CSV, XML, TXT, etc)
If it's not a lot of data, you may find getting the data into an Excel format is the simplest intermediary step. Long ago I wrote an add-in tool for exporting data from Lotus Notes to Excel, which may help you. Or you can use the "Edit > Copy Selected To Table" feature in the Lotus Notes client to copy what is visible in a Notes View to the clipboard, and then paste that into Excel. In that scenario, you'd want to edit the views so they show all the data you need.
I hope this helps!