display folder structure

[Debbie]

I'm trying to create something business-friendly in PBI over the top of a dimensional model. I get the concept of display folders and I can create them and move my dimensions and measures. But I can only create folders underneath the structure of the original table.

I have 100+ dimensions in several tables which have no meaning to the business user and are not intuitive. I want to be able to structure things in the model so that in PBI, it reflects best business practice and not best IT practice. For example I want to pull - say - a dimension from each of three different tables and group them under a completely different heading. So the users will see maybe 3 folders with meaningful headings instead of a dozen tables.

Is there any way I can do this? Otherwise I'm going to have to create extra views in my model to pull data together, which isn't going to be good for performance.

Debbie

[vanessafvg]

@Debbie are you referring to the relationship view?   or are you talking about power query?  

can you give an example of what you are trying to do?  have you considered denormalising at all to remove some of the complexity?

[Debbie]

@vanessafvg - I'm not entirely sure what you mean? I have a model in Visual Studio based over an SSAS cube. My users are (will be) using Power BI. My aim is to present a list of fields and data items in PBI that are actually meaningful, as opposed to a list of tables/columns from the model. I've renamed a lot of stuff at the model level to reflect business-speak, but I'm still stuck with a dozen tables, when business logic could reduce them down to about five.

I tried creatng Display Folders from the properties menu in the Visual Studio mdel. But it simply creates a folder underneath the table. I want my folders to be independent of the tables list in PBI.

Thanks

Debbie

[vanessafvg]

@Debbie i am assuming you using SSAS tabular?  to be honest, if you have too many tables and they can be combined into less dimensions then i do have to question the original modelling of the cube if this is what is being presented to the users?    alternatively you could create sql views and expose that that to the cube.   My personal opinion when to comes to modelling the data for sole use of exploitation in reports your model needs to reflect the business semantic model  which is what you trying to achieve but it sounds like you need to do that before you create the cube not after, unless you add another layer (which sounds lke a pain to be honest) of creating a more intuitive model via imported mode in power bi, ie imported the data in and remodelling, but i am assuming you want users to use a live connection?

[Debbie]

Yes. SSAS tabular. Some of the tables have been modelled in this way to enable us to re-use them as conformed dimensions further down the road in this project. But we're all very new to this, having lived with a relational data warehouse and Business Objects for the past 10 years, so we're learning as we go!

SQL views is the way I'm going at the moment, I think, and we'll re-evaluate later down the project.

Thanks

[v-shex-msft]

Hi @Debbie,

Current, it seems impossible to achieve in power bi side, perhaps you can submit this requirement ideas forum.

Did you try analysis these hierarchy levels and add these relationship table at SSAS side?

Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng