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Improve Power BI PBIP Projects for Git Integration

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Garett Medlin's profile image

Garett Medlin on 27 Oct 2023 22:57:29

The current preview release of the Power BI PBI Projects feature needs improvement for its Git integration to be very useable. At present, with the entire model being saved to a single .bim file, it is extremely easy to get a large number of git conflicts when trying to merge a feature branch into the main branch. A large cause of this seems to be items within the .bim file getting reordered when published to the service. It would be much more ideal to use a serialized folder format similar to Tabular Editor's save to folder feature to avoid conflicts like this. Otherwise, I've found it to be easier to manually copy/paste updates from a feature branch into the main branch's Power BI project.


Also, the structure of the text files for Power BI reports makes it particularly challenging to recognize what would be changed by a pull request. The config sections and other that are very long single lines of text, make resolving any git conflicts for a report a dangerous task.


Finally, I do still sometimes see diffs reported for line endings where "/r" is getting added or removed even though I have enabled autocrlf in my git settings. I'm on a Windows machine.


I do really like how easy it is to create a new branch and sync a workspace to it, so that you can show off new features of what you're working on before committing it to the main development branch. I would love to use this feature to achieve source control without having to manage my model solely within Tabular Editor for Power BI Premium environments. However, we need improvements to the git change recognition workflow for the PBIP format to really be adopted. I'm having headaches using it as intended as a solo developer on a project, so could not recommend it being adopted especially by teams in its current state.

Comments (2)
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Reuben Anderson on 13 Jan 2024 12:12:32

RE: Improve Power BI PBIP Projects for Git Integration

Hoping that there's a plan to fully implement TMDL for PBIP projects and in Desktop.

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Jan Heinze on 18 Dec 2023 09:27:58

RE: Improve Power BI PBIP Projects for Git Integration

These are very good areas of improvement. I agree. Maybe its possible to split the .bim in certain sections, such as powerquery, measures, columns and then additionally try to make the json more compatible to detect the git changes.