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Power BI connector: Version 2

Enhanced Features and Streamlined Data Access​

Our Power BI connector is undergoing significant improvements to provide a more robust and user-friendly experience. Here's an overview of the upcoming changes:

warning

Changes which are marked with 💥 can be breaking to your current reports. For these changes we include an alternative way to fetch the same data as before.

New Authorization Option​

Added API Key authorization as an alternative to OAuth

Power BI Report Server does not natively support OAuth authentication. To address this limitation and provide more flexibility in authentication methods, we have now added support for API Key authorization as an alternative. This new feature allows users to authenticate and access reports using a simple API key mechanism on Power BI report server. There are no differences between OAuth and API key in the way our connector works. You can safely switch between these two authorization methods.

Data Model Enhancements​

  • Added addressee column to addresses
  • Added labels💥: Labels are now organized into separate tables based on their type. Related queries (such as users, teacher, products, etc...) that previously contained their assigned labels have been changed to only include a list of label ids.
  • Added catalogue products: A new table for catalogue products expands the scope of available data, offering more comprehensive product information. You can now fetch product custom fields through this new dataset.
  • Changed custom fields💥: We no longer auto expand custom fields to prevent name conflicts in the future. You can still expand these yourself.

Streamlined User and Account Management​

  • Removed accounts within users💥: This change simplifies the user data structure, potentially reducing complexity in user-related queries. If your reports depend on this account field, we recommend you to use the affiliations table instead. This table provides you with the same information AND also shows you who the key contacts are.
  • Remove key contacts from accounts💥: Key contacts are no longer directly associated with accounts, instead we recommend you to use the affiliations table instead, which contains a key contact property giving you the same functionality.

Improved Data Retrieval​

Use link headers in requests to fetch next page of records

This update optimizes data retrieval for large datasets by implementing link-based pagination. It allows for more efficient handling of multi-page results and will improve overall query performance.

Removed include personal information setting💥

The connector no longer automatically removes personal information from certain tables. This feature proved to be unreliable and we decided to remove it. This means that every import of our connector needs to be changed as the second argument has been removed. To fix your import, replace = Eduframe.Contents("your-slug", "YES") with = Eduframe.Contents("your-slug") in every table where you import data from our connector. This is usually the first step in every table.

Display empty table message

In case Eduframe doesn't return any data for the requested resource, Power BI will now display an empty table message instead of an error.

Enhanced Meeting and Event Data​

Planned materials, locations and attendees are now directly visible on the meeting/events

This change brings critical event-related information to the forefront, making it easier to access and analyze meeting and planning event data without the need for complex joins or relationships. In turn, we removed the PlanningMaterial queries which where slowing down data refreshes. This change introduces 3 new fields:

  • PlanningMaterials💥: Contains all information regarding planned materials such as material_id, comment and amount. The previous separate table to fetch this data has been removed.
  • PlanningAttendees💥: Contains all information related to planned teachers including teacher_id, teacher_role_id and comment. The old field containing only planned teachers has been removed.
  • MeetingLocationIds: List of meeting location ids.
tip

You can prepare your reports for these changes by installing our custom connector beforehand. This allows you to run your reports with these changes and make necessary adaptations to your report before the official release. Please contact our support department for more details: support@drieam.nl

Conclusion​

These updates to our Power BI connector aim to improve data accessibility, enhance security options, and streamline the overall data model. Users can expect a more intuitive experience when working with our datasets, along with potential performance improvements for certain types of queries.