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Power BI Studio

A VSCode extension for managing your Power BI tenant using the Power BI REST API and modify Power BI datasets using TMDL (Tabular Model Definition Language) from within VSCode.

Installation

The extensions can be installed directly from within VSCode by searching for this extension (GerhardBrueckl.powerbi-vscode) or downloaded from the official Visual Studio Code extension gallery at PowerBI VSCode and installed manually as VSIX.

Features

• GUI to browse your workspace and run operations like rebind, clone, ... • Modify Power BI datasets using TMDL - see TMDL • Supports VSCode and vscode.dev • Connect to remote tenants where you are invited as a guest user - see Configuration • Run DAX queries in a notebook against your Power BI Datasets using %dax magic • Run arbitrary REST API calls in a notebook using %api magic - see Notebooks • Drag & Drop to run certain commands (e.g. drop a report on a dataset to rebind it) • GUI to manage Capacities, Gatways and Pipelines

Configuration

The extension supports the following VSCode settings:

|Setting|Description|Example value|

|powerbi.tenantId|(Optional) The tenant ID of the remote tenant that you want to connect to.|A GUID, abcd1234-1234-5678-9abcd-9d1963e4b9f5| |powerbi.clientId|(Optional) A custom ClientID/Application of an AAD application to use when connecting to Power BI.|A GUID, 99887766-1234-5678-9abcd-e4b9f59d1963| |powerbi.cloud|(Optional) Only use when you want to connect to a sovereign or governmental cloud!|GlobalCloud| |powerbi.TMDL.clientId|(Optional) To use TMDL features, a custom ClientID/Application can be used. You can use 058487e5-bde7-4aba-a5dc-2f9ac58cb668 and make sure its permitted in your tenant or you can create your own AAD application in your AAD tenant (see README) for details. If this is configured, VSCode will manage the authentication and also remember it!|A GUID, 058487e5-bde7-4aba-a5dc-2f9ac58cb668| |powerbi.TMDL.enabled|Set to true (default) to allow editing Power BI datasets using TMDL.|true(default)/false| |powerbi.workspaceFilter|(Optional) A regex to filter workspaces by name. Only workspaces matching this regex will be shown in the Power BI Workspaces view.|Project A\|Sales to see only workspaces that have "Project A" or (\|) "Sales" in the name| |powerbi.datasetRefreshCheckInterval|(Optional) The number of seconds to wait between checking for completed dataset refreshes in the background. Set to 0 to disable automatic refresh checks.|60|

Notebooks

You can open a new Power BI notebook via the UI from the header of each treeview or by running the command Open new PowerBI Notebook (command PowerBI.openNewNotebook). Power BI notebooks have the file extension .pbinb and will automatically open in the notebook editor.

The following features are supported by notebooks and can be used using magic tags in the first line of the cell: • running arbitrary REST API calls (magic %api) • executing DAX queries against a dataset (magic %dax) • executing TMSL statements against a dataset (requires TMDL) (magic %tmsl) • setting variables to be used in subsequent cells (magic %cmd)

Next to the magic itself you can also specify a custom API endpoint for every cell right after the magic tag:

This overwrites the API_PATH set for the notebook to run DAX queries. You can now run multiple DAX statements against different datasets from within the same notebook without changing the API_PATH every time. For example if you want to run the same query against TEST and PROD to compare results etc.

Custom API endpoints work for all magics except %cmd which does not interact with the API at all.

For proper visualization of the results I highly recommend to also install the Data Table Renderers extension!

Run REST API calls (%api)

To run a REST API call from the notebook you can simply write the following:

For example to create a new dashboard in _My Workspace_ you can run the following command:

The JSON-body can also be omitted, e.g. for a GET request. Supported METHODs are GET, POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE. the _endpoint_ can either be absolute (e.g. https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/dashboards), relative to the root of the API (e.g. /dashboards) or relative to the path set via notebook variables API_PATH (e.g. ./refreshes) (see Using Variables below)

You can also execute call against the Fabric REST APIs. The only thing you need to do is to use the full path of the API, e.g. https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/v1/workspaces. You can either specify it directly in your notebook cell or via API_PATH and relative paths in the cells.

Execute DAX queries (%dax)

To run a DAX query from within the notebook, you have to use the cell magic %dax in the very first line of your cell. The following lines will contain the actual DAX query:

For this to work, you first need to set the variable DATASET in your notebook before - see Using Variables below.

Using variables (%cmd)

You can also define and use variables within the notebook. To set a variable you can use

Please note that variable names are note case sensitive and are converted to UPPER when you define them. However, you reference them using any casing you want.

Current values of variables can be retrieved by running SET MY_VARIABLE. Note: you can also set/get multiple variables within the same notebook cell! Variables can be used via the pattern $(). Assuming the variable My_Variable is set to 123:

Special Variables

API_PATH

There are some special variables that must be set in combination with %dax magic to identify the dataset. The main variable that needs to be set is the API_PATH (aliases are also DATASET_PATH, API_PATHor API_ROOT_PATH) to identify the dataset to which the DAX query is sent. the value has to be an API path pointing to the dataset:

_cells

Another special variable is _cells which allows you to refernce the output of other cells. The full syntax is _cells[]. This variable can then be used like this:…

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