Invalid characters for names of workspaces, dashboards, etc.

[Anonymous]

Power BI seems to be very flexible in what characters are allowed in the names of dashboards, reports, etc. Are there any invalid characters at all for these names?

Due to the associated creation of a group, do workspace names have any practical character restrictions that other Power BI object names do not?

Are there any characters that are valid within Power BI, but which don't work well when creating objects via the API?

Thanks,

Tim Curwick

[Greg_Deckler]

Hmm, that's a very broad question and I am not aware of any documentation that covers the entire breadth of which you are asking. I did however recently do an Introduction to DAX presentation and here is a note from that:

The following characters and character types are not valid in the names of tables, columns, or measures:

• Leading or trailing spaces; unless the spaces are enclosed by name delimiters, brackets, or single apostrophes.
• Control characters
• The following characters that are not valid in the names of Power Pivot objects:
• .,;':/\*|?&%$!+=()[]{}<>

Not entirely what you are asking for but the best I have at the moment.

[Anonymous]

Greg,

I'm not concerned with data objects at this time. I'm at a meta level, creating API wrappers and automations for working with Power BI objects, not the stuff within them. Specifically, this afternoon, I'm creating wrappers for API calls to create dashboards and workspaces. I want to know if I need to check names for invalid characters before creating them.  The wrappers will be used globally, so I need to allow everything I can, but I want to anticipate and catch characters that would break something.

Manually I can successfull create dashboards with every character on my en-us keyboard, including all of the characters you listed. This leads me to hope that the Power BI team has successfully isolated these display names from anything which may try to parse them in anyway, thereby allowing any valid string to be a valid dashboard name.

I am looking for confirmation of this hope so that I can skip character validation, or specific refutation of it so that I can perform appropriate character validation.

Whatever the state of the names of dashboards and similar objects, I suspect workspace names are more restrictive, due to restrictions in the names of the associated Group that is created. So I am looking for confirmation or additional details on this assumption as well.

Thanks,

Tim Curwick

[Greg_Deckler]

I've never seen anything like that documented here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/

Which is where I would expect that to be.