When I was developing a new dataset, which was going to be referenced by many hundreds of reports, I wanted to be able to tell the end users that this dataset is under maintenance for some time. It is a kind of user friendliness if the user immediately knows that the visualized data in Power BI service can be wrong.
I was searching for a simple solution to inform the users that I am currently working on the dataset. It means some reports may deliver wrong data or some visuals may not work properly.
How can it happen that a dataset contains wrong data? I do not yet use the new deployment pipelines and my local PBIX file contains only up to 1000 rows per table. When I publish the dataset, I have to change the count of rows in a parameter in Power BI Service to get all data. The approach is described for example here.
How To
I have created an empty text field at the bottom of every report page. The text field’s data is a measure:
If the column’s text is empty, the measure returns an empty string. If there is some text, I prepend and append an emoji symbol warning. Why is it not enough to have a big bold red text? According to Wikipedia, every 12th man in Germany is colorblind. If you have colorblind users, they will appreciate it 😊
The column used in the measure “Maintenance Warning Text” comes from a Direct Query table. It is important to use Direct Query at this point because the warning text should not be stored in the dataset! I want to have the option to change the text in a Microsoft SQL Server database all the time and it will be shown the user as soon as they open or refresh a report.