How to document report visualizations in Power BI?

Question

I've been using Dax to help me Document my Power BI file. Using Dax queries I've been able to record all the fields that exist in the file, including calculated and measured fields. In my documentation process I am also looking to find a way to record visualizations on the report - namely the charts and graphs. Unfortunately, no Dax query I've read about provides a list of data such as the visualization title, what fields it's using, or what kind of graph it is. Is there any Dax query that provides this information, as a whole or any part of it?

In addition to attempting to document with Dax I have also looked at the raw XML data in the Power BI file (For those who may not know, you can rename your Power BI file from .pbix to .zip and view the raw data). The relevant files within PBI are either XML or JSON. Looking at ../Report/Layout.JSON specifically I have seen JSON-formatted text that includes visualization data. Is there any easy way to extract this data and format it in a more-readable fashion?

For clarity, I do not need the contents of the tables, but I would like a way to record what fields are being used in the visualization, rather than what fields merely exist.

EDIT: I've found a workaround. It isn't efficient, and I would still appreciate any knowledge on this subject

I mentioned going through the the Layout file, renaming it to .JSON and poking it in Notepad++. I've found that you can ctrl+f for "displayName", "queryRef" and ""title\":show\":true,\"text\":\"". Break these all to new lines and indent them with tab (Use ctrl+h and replace with \n\t in notepad). These indent the JSON-formatted lines for Power BI pages, fields called by visualizations, and the visualization titles (if they have any), respectively.

Save this document as .csv and load it into Excel by delimiting on tabs. Use your preferred process - I prefer query editor - editor to remove the other non-indented rows. There still may be a lot of excess characters on the indented lines which need to be removed manually. At the end of this process, though, I ended with 3 columns in excel listing the aforementioned fields I've been looking for.

On a PBIX file with more than a dozen pages and several hundred dependent fields this process took about three hours. If there are any faster ways to do this, I would love to hear about them

This blog and the links within are gold for documenting: datasavvy.me/2016/10/04/… — StelioK
@StelioK,unfortunately I've visited that blog a few times in my searches. The queries posted have been useful in helping me record all the fields in the PBI model, but they didn't find one that returned fields currently in-use — PausePause

mmarie mmarie · Accepted Answer · 2018-07-28T04:16:08

As you have noted, DAX doesn't help you in this case because it will tell you about the model rather than the visuals on the report pages. The Layout file works, but you have to parse it for the information you need. You could probably just pull that JSON file into Power BI and process it there to get the info you want. There are also third party tools that can help with this. I just looked at https://app.datavizioner.com/ and it lists the ID of the visual, the type of visual, and each field used in the visual. It is currently free and just requires you to upload a PBIT of your report. It doesn't have the title of the visual that we see, so you would have to find a way to map the IDs you see to the human-friendly title of the visuals if you need that.

How to document report visualizations in Power BI?

3 Answers