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tessahurr
Employee
Employee

Share your thoughts on the new model view UI (preview)

Hit Reply and let us know what you think of the new model view UI.  To learn more about this feature, please visit our blog.

 

Here are some areas that we'd like to hear about in particular:

  • Performance and the experience for large models that exceed 50 tables
    • Edit: We've heard some feedback regarding the All tables tab in the model view. If you are using a model with 50+ tables, you can mitigate some of the issues you may be facing by setting the environment variable PBI_diagramTableThreshold to a number greater than or equal to 10 and less than 1000. This environment variable allows you to adjust the number of tables that the All tables tab will show.
  • Table card tooltips and the information they display when you hover over a table header

 

Thanks and we look forward to hearing your feedback!

 

- The Power BI Model View Team

50 REPLIES 50
Anonymous
Not applicable

I just want to express my disappointment here as well. Disabling the all-table view and suggesting "drag and drop everything and use reset-layout" is totally unaccaptable. The reset feature is not even close to how I like to look at my model. 

Anonymous
Not applicable

This must be the worst idea you guys ever had. I need to see my 50+ tables because sometimes the issuses doesn 't shows until y start working. Now I lost visibility of my hole model because of this. I need to see my 50+ Tables immediatly or i will have to change to the competition.

peterkalk
Advocate I
Advocate I

What a horrible update. My overview over all tables is gone. I have to go back to an older backup with a whole day of development gone.... causing serious headache. Isn't there any solution to get back my old all-tables view without losing a day's work?

Pat_msft
Employee
Employee

@Ole111 - This is by design. The All tables layout is specifically disabled in this case where performance cannot be guaranteed. There is no way to recover this state without changing the environment variable and then opening up a PBIX previously saved with the information. 

 

@Ole111 and @johandure - Setting environment variables is a standard windows procedure. Search from the start menu for "Set environment variable" and you will see a window pop up that says "System Properties", in here you can click the button "Environment Variables", then "New", then enter the name PBI_diagramTableThreshold, and then the value (100 for example). Press okay until the dialogs are gone, and then start a new instance of Power BI Desktop. The limit should no longer apply.

 

@Mohamed_Hashim - Again, this is likely not related to upgrading the model view. Relationships should not be deleted. We recommend starting a support case via your usual mechanism as this is likely something wrong with either your model or a new bug in desktop.

@Pat_msft - thanks for the instruction. Yet it doesn't work. Aftering entering 'Environment Variable' and restarting computer it still doesn't show 'all tables' view. Does the entered name 'PBI_diagramTableThreshold' depend on the localization language or is irrelevant? Any other hints to cope with that?

l also have this problem. I have 50+ tables. I can't find out "Set environment variable" from the Start Menu and other settings. Can you show me some pictures about these steps? Thanks

johandure
Frequent Visitor

This is horrible. I need the old functionality back. 
There is no easy way to get a good overview of all relations anymore... Add tables and adding 'related tables' doesn't show the relations. 
I nowhere find instructions on how to set the PBI_diagramTableThreshold  environment variable... Serious headache from this change 😞

tez
Resolver I
Resolver I


@tessahurr wrote:

...Edit: We've heard some feedback regarding the All tables tab in the model view. If you are using a model with 50+ tables, you can mitigate some of the issues you may be facing by setting the environment variable PBI_diagramTableThreshold to a number greater than or equal to 10 and less than 1000. This environment variable allows you to adjust the number of tables that the All tables tab will show...

Please get back the behaviour implemented before; I cannot set environment variables on my company PC for security reasons.

Ole111
Helper II
Helper II

Where can I set  the environment variable PBI_diagramTableThreshold?

Please instruct.

 

BTW - this new limitation is really ennoying. I got stuck with many projects trying to recover lot of my work.

Pat_msft
Employee
Employee

@Anonymous , @Mohamed_Hashim @Anonymous , please refer to the updated post here; Tessa added information on using an environment variable to bypass the default threshold. This should allow you to workaround issues with the limited view. Mohamed, there is no reason that the "Manage Relationships" dialog should be empty. There's likely something else going on with your model. Going over the 50 table threshold doesn't actually remove relationships from the model, it simply disables one view.

 

You can always press Ctrl+A in the field list, drag all the tables to a custom layout, and then press the "Reset layout" button in the bottom right. This will effectively override the threshold for that layout. Explicitly creating a layout that larges tells desktop that it is intentional and that you are accepting performance implications. You will have lost the customizations to the "All Tables" layout though, that is true.

 

If you have saved your pbix after opening the latest release of desktop, and the limit has been exceeded, you will have lost the All Tables layout customizations, and even bypassing the limit will no longer restore the customizations. You will need a copy of the original pbix with the customizations to "All Tables" still intact. Otherwise, upon opening the file, you will be presented with a default layout of all the tables, and any customization will need to be redone - this is equivalent to creating a new layout and dragging all the tables to it as described above.

 

A note: the performance characteristics of bypassing this limit are real. You will see increased memory utilization of Power BI Desktop, and may notice drag/drop implications as well as others. We recommend instead creating multiple smaller layouts which are more contextual to the tables they contain. 3 or more layouts with ~20 tables each is much easier to understand and is much more performant. We are separately investigating ways to improve the performance of the diagram.

 

If you have a model with 200+ tables (for example), what do you think the end user of your model would like to see? Seeing all tables at once makes it very difficult to parse the diagram, lowers performance, and overall is difficult to work with. We are looking for as much feedback as possible on this, feel free to send us your thoughts. 

actually for some reason, all my existing table relationships were deleted when I upgraded to the new model view.

I re-installed october version and building the deleted relationships again from scratch.

Pressing Ctrl+A and dragging all tables to the canvas doesn't work. Is there something I am missing? 

To be specific - I can not drag all the tables to "All tables" canvas. Only to newly crated custom one.  Then - even if it restores the tables with their relations - all the previously built star scheme is totally messed up.

Is there a way just to get all in the state it had been left before this misfortune update?

Anonymous
Not applicable

Please roll this back immediately, very frustrating move here. Some of us use the Data Model view as a place to organize all tables and see all relationships all at the same time in order to make relationship and directional decisions. Via Manage Relationships, sure I can see all the relationships still exist, and sure via dragging all tables to a New Layout will display them all again, but all the organziation is gone. Echoing others....not okay.

Hi,

I have the same issue.

I have a complex data model with 50+ tables, all of them are connected with relationships and following November update, I cannot see my relationships anymore.

I have tried to "add related tables" as described above, it doesn't work.

I've also tried to click on "manage relationships" and it seems that all my relationships were deleted or at least I cannot see it anymore.

this would take months to rebuild if I cannot see the relationships I had earlier.

Mohamed_Hashim_0-1605443569830.png

 

Pat_msft
Employee
Employee

@alec20191104 - That's the display that you should only be getting when nothing is currently selected. No tables or fields. Can you try clicking on the table in the diagram view to see if that displays the table properties? Then try unselecting it and selecting it from the field list on the right. If one of them works, but one doesn't, or if neither works, we'll have to dig into this issue further. 

@Pat_msft - I have tried selecting, double clicking, everything, no mater where or what I select I get the same menu 

Anonymous
Not applicable

I hope this can get fixed, otherwise I will have to re-do MONTHS of work.

I have a Power Bi desktop file that weights more than 4GB. It has way over 50 tables on the Data Model.

Today when I opened the file I got the message that the view had been disabled and I cannot see ANY of my tablesCapture.JPG

I do have another file that weights less than 1GB and I am able to see the tables on that one, which makes me think the new feature is not handling well heavy/multiples tables.

I really hope this can get fixed by Monday

Hi @Anonymous, as documented in our blog post, this was a change that was made to help with performance issues.  Can you give some feedback on what you use the All tables view for with a model that is 50+ tables? Please note you can still create layouts of your model.

Anonymous
Not applicable

The problem is that, eventhough I can create layouts, somehow my "old layout" seems to still be in place. That is why I say I will need to re-do the work that took me months.

I have tables from different sources (SQL, Excel) all for different data. I also have some other tables where I do LOOKUPVALUE to bring in data. Finally I have other tables that I link to the main tables in order to filter them. For example: I will have a main "Week" table that I will connect to all week values on all the other different source tables so that then I can do a charts that will all filter at the same time by just filtering on "Week".

Not sure if I made sense. I cannot be the only one experiencing this

@Anonymous All of your tables, and their connections are still present. They all will have the same functionality. We simply cannot display them all at the same time in a single layout. If you click on the + icon at the bottom to create a new layout, you should be able to drag in your main tables, and then right click on the diagram background and select "Add related tables". You can build up a new layout of your choosing, but the model itself will remain as it was.

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