grouping overlapping date ranges on a sorted data set

[styleofthetiger]

hello,

apologies if this is has already been asked, and if so please point me to that thread, i'm taking a shot in the dark here. can the following be done with powerBI (i suspect that it can, i have no idea how though):

we are trying to group overlapping maintenance events, each row of data has an equipment type, start date/time, and end date/time, what we want is to identify which rows overlap with each other.. the repairs may not be related to each other but they would all relate to the equipment being worked on, maybe it's getting overhauled and they decide to do the paint too, etc.

if the row's date does NOT overlap with the previous one, the overlap period resets, and a summary row is written to a summary table with the overlap range (1 record covering all the dates that the kit was in the shop). if it DOES overlap, the overlapping range is extended to the latest date of the two rows and on we go to the next row for more comparisons.

the end result and all we really want, is a list of overlapping date ranges per equipment that can be visualized, and also dug into to show the related maintenance events for a given group. i have this working using a perl script that reads a csv file, and writes two more csv files that are loaded to powerBI. what would be super cool would be to keep the solution entirely inside powerbi so nobody has to extract data and run it through the perl script and refresh the output, plus using the script adds a dependency on the filesystem in addition to needing perl. was thinking python but within powerBI it seems to be for just getting data, doing some transformations, building charts etc but haven't seen anything about using a while loop to scan through each row and do analysis on the whole data set this way. 

does this make sense? i don't know powerBI well so not sure if this is not what it's supposed to do, or if i'm not using it right, and i suspect it's the latter. not sure where to go from here, the tutorials online are for beginners and don't go into stuff like this. alternative, am willing to learn DAX and/or M if it can be implemented that way, any advice on how to solve the above?

i have tried keeping the problem in my thoughts and prayers with surprisingly little success, so figured maybe some advice could be gleaned from ye who also wield the keyboard in search of answers.

[yingyinr]

Hi @styleofthetiger ,

Whether your problem has been resolved? If yes, could you please mark the helpful post as Answered? It will help the others in the community find the solution easily if they face the same problem as yours. Thank you.

Best Regards

[yingyinr · Accepted solution]

Hi @styleofthetiger ,

Could you please provide some sample data about maintenance events with Text format and your expected result with backend logic and special examples? It is better if you can share a simplified pbix file. You can refer the following link to upload the file to the community. Thank you.

How to upload PBI in Community

In addition, please review the following link. Hope it can give you some clue and insights.

Find overlapped date ranges and add corresponding performance metrics to measure efficiency

Best Regards