Power Query deletes comments

[JoshT]

Using Power BI desktop, if there are comments made in the advanced query editor, and the user deletes a step adjacent to those comments (above or below), the comments are removed as well. Comments should not be removed since they're not connected to the step and may contain important information.

[v-mengzhu-msft]

Hi @JoshT ,

I do the testing:

1 add comments:

2 delete the below steps:

The comments I added are still there.

Do youhave the same steps as me? What version of power bi desktop do you have?

Best regards,

Community Support Team Selina zhu

[JoshT]

Thanks for looking into this @v-mengzhu-msft.

Apologies, I meant to say when the step is deleted in the Power Query UI. Repro steps are:

Create comment (I've done it before and after the last step in the query, not sure if it matters if there's other subsequent steps):

Click Done and then delete last step in UI:

Open advanced editor again, comments both before and after have been deleted:

I'm on version 2.110.805.0 64-bit of PBI desktop.

[v-mengzhu-msft]

Hi @JoshT ,

From my test results, this should be a design problem, for example, I added a comment here:

we can see in the step, "changed type" a step on the right side of the comment logo,

that is, this is attributed together, then you will remove this step, will also remove the comment.
My suggestion is to put the comment before all the steps, as much as possible.

If you have the necessary requirements for this, you can submit your ideas here Ideas (powerbi.com)

It is a place for customers provide feedback about Microsoft Office products . What’s more, if a feedback is high voted there by other customers, it will be promising that Microsoft Product Team will take it into consideration when designing the next version in the future.

Best regards,

Community Support Team Selina zhu

[JoshT]

thanks @v-mengzhu-msft, that makes sense. I certainly agree it's a design issue - I don't know of any other IDE that couples comments to lines of code like this. It's a particular problem if you're e.g. commenting out lines of code to experiment (something all developers need to do from time to time), it means you could lose substantial amounts of code unintentionally. If it were my call I'd say this is definitely a bug but appreciate there may be more pressing stuff for the product team.

I'll post on ideas, but it's a bit of a graveyard for stuff like this so I don't anticipate any change on this any time soon