Tag: Office 365

Using Power Query with SharePoint Lists and Lookup Fields

Published September 24, 2014

As I’ve explained many times before, querying SharePoint data directly is a bad idea. The SharePoint data storage mechanisms simply aren’t designed for querying of any scale, hence the lookup limitations that have been imposed upon it. The best approach to querying SharePoint list data is to first load it into a data warehouse or data mart of some sort. However, both Reporting Services (SSRS) and Power Query support direct access to SharePoint lists. While I try to strongly dissuade people from doing this with Reporting Services, properly used, Power Query is a totally viable means of querying SharePoint list data.

Why is this? With SSRS, every query goes back to the data source for retrieval. Power Query is different – it’s analogous to SQL Server Integration Services, which is an ETL management product. It loads source data into a repository, in this case, an embedded xVelocity, or Power Pivot model which can be considered a “personal data warehouse”. Queries against this mini data warehouse are fast, and don’t rely on SharePoint retrieval mechanisms, and can be used quite effectively in reports.

There are a couple of subtleties to querying SharePoint list items with Power Query, and I will briefly walk through the process below.

With Excel open, click the Power Query tab, select “From Other Sources” and the select “From SharePoint List”.

Next, enter the URL for the SharePoint site (or subsite) that contains the list you wish to query.

If it is the first time accessing this site, you will be prompted for credentials. If your site is Office365, be sure to enter organizational credentials. If it is on premise, use Windows credentials.

Once entered, you will be presented with a list of SharePoint lists in the Power Query Navigator window. Select the list that you wish to query, in our case, Announcements. When selected, click the edit button to edit the query.

The data, or a subset will load into the query editor window. You will see all of the list item fields expressed as columns, and for the most part, using the correct data type. At this point you can remove any columns that are unnecessary, or filter any undesired rows. There are a couple of SharePoint field types that bear special mention.

Lookup fields are a lookup into another SharePoint list. Internally, the SharePoint item stores this as an ID and display value, but Power Query gives you access to all of the properties of the related item as a one-to-one relationship. Essentially, what you can do is to flatten that relationship by incorporating the related item’s attributes.

If you scroll to a column of this particular type, you will see the value expressed as a hyperlink with the value “Record”. Clicking on it will drill down to one related record, but that’s not what we want to do. We want to expand the properties for all items in the list. The way that you do this is to click on the expand icon in the column header. In our case, we want to expand the “CreatedBy” field. CreatedBy is a standard list field, of the Person type. Person fields are actually a special case of a lookup field, so it exhibits this behaviour.

Here, we are interested in retrieving the user’s name and mobile phone, so we deselect all of the other fields. A new column will be created for every expanded field in the format sourcefieldname.attributename .

Attachments are another special case. There can be multiple attachments for a single list item, a one to many relationship. The hyperlink is therefore “Table”. Clicking on the column header expand for this column looks similar, but with an important difference. Options are available to either expand or aggregate the related items.

Selecting expand will create a new source record for each related item, and the only columns that will differ will be the items selected from the related table (Name in our case). Aggregate will not create any new records, but will summarize the related fields. For numeric fields, they can be totalled or averaged, and for text fields they can be counted.

Once ready, click “Close and Load” from the Query Editor ribbon, and the list data will load to either your model, or your workbook, depending on what your preferences are. Of course, I always recommend that you load to the model only.

Once loaded, any visualizations and queries will work against the model. The data can be refreshed at any point either manually, or automatically if using the Data Management Gateway. Keep in mind however that refreshes will operate against the source list.

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Using the SSIS OData Source Connector With SharePoint Online Authentication

Published March 30, 2014

Last week, Microsoft released the OData Source for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 . What is it? It allows SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to use an OData feed as a first class citizen data source in the same manner as SQL Server, Oracle, etc. Until now it was necessary to code OData connections using the script object.

This matters to those of us in the SharePoint world because any SharePoint list data can be expressed as OData.

I’ve written before about how SharePoint data can be extracted into a data warehouse using SSIS and the SharePoint List Source and Destination Adapters, available from CodePlex. These adapters plug in to SSIS and wrapper the SharePoint SOAP web services, and therefore do not need to be installed on a SharePoint server. We have used them for years, and they work very well, however, they are a CodePlex project, and therefore not fully supported.

These CodePlex adapters have more recently been bumping into another limitation. While SOAP web services are supported in Office 365, the adapters don’t support the Office 365 authentication mechanism, which effectively renders them useless. The OData services require the same authentication, but the the new OData Source supports it. It’s also an official Microsoft product, and is fully supported.

There is, however a trick to getting it working. Once you install the OData Source, you open up SQL Server Data Tools, open an SSIS project, and add or edit a data flow task. In the SSIS Toolbox, You should see the OData Source.

Drag the tool on to the design surface, and double click to configure it. You’ll first need to configure an OData Connection Manager, and you’ll do that by clicking the New button.

Give the connection a name. The connection will be common to all lists and libraries within a site, so something based on the name of the site is likely appropriate. The Service document location is the OData endpoint. It takes the form of the URL of the site, along with the suffix /_vti_bin/listdata.svc. If the connection is on premises, you can use Windows Authentication, but if it is Office 365, you must use a stored name and password.

If you are using Office 365, and you click Test Connection at this point, you’ll receive an error “Test connection failed –> The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.”

This is due to Office 365’s “unique” authentication mechanism. In order to authenticate to Office 365, you must first select the “All” button in the toolbar, and set the value of “Microsoft Online Services Authentication” to true.

This option may not be available to you. If the Online Services Authentication option is disabled, or greyed out, as it was for me when I first tried to use it, it’s because a prerequisite is missing. In order to authenticate to Office 365, the machine must have the SharePoint Server 2013 Client Components SDK installed on it.

Once the client components are in place, and the option is selected, the data source should be able to connect to the source, and the connection manager can be closed. Lists are exposed as Collections, so if you want to work with list data, you can then select the list from the list of Collections.

At this point, the data source will act like any other SSIS data source, you can select and transform columns at will. More importantly, this will help you get SharePoint data both on-prem and in the cloud into a central data warehouse.

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How to Refresh Data Models in Office 365 from On Premises Using Nintex Workflow – A Hybrid Approach

Published March 13, 2014

One of the viable use cases for Power BI is to provide reporting to a mobile workforce, even when the organization has invested in BI on premises. In this scenario, there may be a SharePoint farm using PowerPivot for SharePoint with multiple workbooks connected to a myriad of data sources, including SQL Server Analysis Services cubes and models.

The Problem

In this scenario, the workbooks required by the mobile users can be copied up to the Office 365 tenant, and consumed from there. However, how is the data kept current? One way to do so is to set up the Power BI Data Management Gateway (DMG) to do this. The DMG is a great solution, but is relatively new, and has a few inherent limitations at the moment. Chief among them is that data can only be refreshed from SQL Server or Oracle data sources. For the moment at least, Analysis Services is left out in the cold. However, PowerPivot for SharePoint doesn’t share these limitations, and has no problem refreshing data from a wide variety of sources. Unfortunately, if you’re using Power BI, and need to refresh from an unsupported data source, you’re out of luck for the moment, so this is a problem.

Keeping a cloud copy of a local workbook carries the inherent problems of managing two different copies of the same workbooks. Every modification must be performed twice and there is always the chance that something will get missed. Ideally, for this scenario, we should have a publishing mechanism. We can use Nintex Workflow (on premises) to provide this publishing mechanism for us. Whenever the model is refreshed, the workflow will fire, and copy the file up to Office 365 to update the model there.

In order to implement this solution, you’ll need a copy of Nintex Workflow. The low end (Team) edition is fine, but what we’re after is the “Copy document to Office 365” action, and that is available through the Nintex Live action set.

The Solution

To start, we’ll work with an Excel workbook that is using an embedded model created from the standard Contoso Data Warehouse. In this example, we’ve built a simple pivot table to interact with the model. The model has been published to a PowerPivot gallery, and the refresh schedule has been set. Once we’ve tested the refresh to ensure that it’s working, we can create the workflow. To do so, we go to the workflow options section in the library ribbon and create a new Nintex workflow.

We then select the Blank template. Once presented with the design canvas, we select Workflow Settings, give it a good name, and set the workflow to run on create and on edit.

Once the settings have been saved, we can start to build the actual workflow. The first action will be a “Pause for” action. Find it in the Workflow Actions toolbar, and drag it onto the design surface. Select configure from its drop down menu, and set it to pause for a period of time, in this case, 5 minutes.

The amount of time that we need to pause for depends on how long it takes our model to refresh. When the refresh operation begins, it “edits” the document, which kicks off the workflow. We don’t want to upload the workbook until the refresh operation is complete, so we need to pause it. In this case, we are working with a data model that is about 100 MB and comprised of about 3 million rows of data. In this environment, it requires about 2.5 minutes to refresh, so a 5 minute pause is sufficient.

Next, we need to use the “Office 365 upload file” action. This action is one of the Nintex Live actions that can be added at no extra charge to the Nintex environment. If it hasn’t already been added to the toolbar, we need to do so. Assuming that Nintex Live has been enabled for the farm, we browse the available actions through the Catalog which is available through the designer ribbon.

Once in the catalog, we can browse the available actions, and click the Add button to add them to the toolbox. The action that we need to add is named “Office 365 upload file”. Once at least one action is added, an new section will appear in the Workflow Actions toolbar named “Nintex Live”. We then open that section and drag the Office 365 file upload action onto the design surface after the pause action, then configure it.

Walking through the options:

File to upload: We want the current file to be uploaded to Office 365, so we select current item
Destination site URL: This is in fact the URL of the site itself. Everything up to, but not including the document library
Folder path: This is the name of the destination document library, and if appropriate, any subfolders
File name: We can create or derive a new name for the file, but in this case, we will be using the same name as the source file
Overwrite existing file: We select this option, as we will be updating existing content.
Fields: We can add additional metadata values if we wish, but in this case, we leave it empty
SharePoint Online URL: this is the URL to the root of the Office 365 tenant for the destination
Username and password are for a proxy account that will be used to upload the file. Secure workflow constants can be used.

Once we configure the action, we save it, our workflow should appear as follows:

and we are ready to publish the workflow. To do so, select the Publish button, then close the workflow designer.

We are now ready to test our workflow. We can force the workflow to run on demand for our workbook, but a better test is to let the refresh trigger it. The most frequently that PowerPivot for SharePoint refreshes can be scheduled to run is once per day. but there is a way to force the refresh to happen on demand.

To force a refresh, we need to edit the refresh schedule for the workbook. Open up the refresh history screen by selecting Manage Data Refresh for the workbook.

From the Refresh history screen, select the Configure Schedule link to edit the schedule. This will allow us to edit the existing schedule, but more importantly, it will also let us force a refresh by selecting the “Also refresh as soon as possible” option.

If we are using a specific account as a credential, we will also need to re-enter that. Once complete, selecting OK will queue the refresh job for execution. The refresh job will happen the next time that the “PowerPivot Data Refresh Timer Job” executes, and it runs every 5 minutes.

If you’re really impatient, and you have access to central administration, you can edit this timer job and force it to run immediately on a case by case basis.

Moving back to the refresh history screen we will notice that the refresh is currently running.

And in the workflow history screen for the workbook, we can see that the workflow is also running.

Once both operations have completed, we can navigate to our Office 365 site, and we will find the file in the destination folder. If our model is greater than 10 MB in size, we will require Power BI in order to interact with it in the browser, and we will need to enable it for use with Power BI through the Power BI application. If it has already been enabled, then no additional actions are required. If the workbook is less than 10MB, it will work directly in any Office 365 library that is enabled for Excel Services.

More Possibilities

If you’ve worked with the Power BI Data Management Gateway at all, you’ll know that data refreshes can be scheduled at most daily. This limitation is also shared by PowerPivot for SharePoint, but it is possible to change its behaviour. Using the techniques outlined in this article by Ian Smith, and this article by Tim Laqua, refreshes can be made as granular as 5 minutes. These articles are written for SharePoint 2010, but the principles work with 2013 (hint, the stored procedure that forces a refresh is [DataRefresh].[AddRefreshSchedule]). Be warned, this technique is a hack, and not supported by Microsoft. However, it can be a way to up the frequency of refreshes on premises, and with the above technique, in Office 365 too.

Another way to refresh the data more often is by using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). SSIS can update an embedded data model in an Excel workbook through a script action (thanks to Gobán Saor). SSIS packages can be scheduled with SQL agent jobs, which means that they can be run as frequently as every minute. Another advantage of this approach is that with Excel 2013, this method should be fully supported.

Finally…

By relying on our workflow to publish the refreshed model, we work around the current limitations of the Data Management Gateway. We do incur the cost of a Nintex license, but a few days of development would easily exceed that cost. In fact, if our data model doesn’t exceed 10 MB, we don’t even need Power BI for this solution to work.

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Business Intelligence in SharePoint and Office 365

Published March 9, 2014

At the recent SharePoint Conference 2014, I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Karuana Gatimu of Microsoft IT and Channel 9. The original video can be found on Channel 9 here, and I include it below as well. In it, we discuss the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack, the impact of the new Power BI products, and how to get started.

Scheduled Data Refresh in Power BI

Published February 5, 2014

It’s finally here.

Quietly, sometime over the past few days, Microsoft updated the Power BI application in Office 365 along with the Data Management Gateway (get it here). Chief among the changes is the ability to schedule data refresh, which to my thinking, is the single most important feature for deploying Business Intelligence solution in the cloud.

Until now, it has been possible to refresh Excel worksheets with embedded data models on demand, In fact, if your data source was also in the cloud (and was one of the supported data sources), you don’t need Power BI to do it, it’s supported natively in Office 365. If your data source is on-premises (and either Oracle or SQL Server), you can do it through the Data Management Gateway. What has been missing is the ability to have the data model refreshed in the absence of interaction. No longer.

This capability can of course be found in PowerPivot for SharePoint on premises. It is configured on a per workbook basis in the PowerPivot Gallery, which is a PowerPivot focused view of a document library that contains workbooks. In works in much the same manner with Power BI, with the Power BI application taking the place of the Power Pivot gallery.

Configuring Scheduled Refresh

To turn on automatic refresh for a workbook, you need to access the workbook’s BI context menu. To do this, first, open the Power BI application, then locate the workbook that you wish to have refreshed automatically. Click on the ellipsis to access the menu.

A number of items have been added to the menu, and to the preview graphic itself. To the left of the ellipsis is information on when the model was last updated, and the context menu adds the ability to edit in Excel and to add to Q&A as well. However, the feature that we’re interested in is the scheduled data refresh, and selecting that option takes us to the scheduled refresh screen.

If refresh has not already been configured, it opens into the settings tab, otherwise, the history tab will be opened.

To turn on refresh, simply select the “on” slider. If your model has multiple data sources you can choose them to be included or not. As far as I have seen, you can only have one schedule per workbook, so if a data source isn’t included, it simply won’t be updated.

Next, select your refresh schedule, which will be either daily or weekly. By default, your schedule will have a shelf life of 90 days, and will turn off after that time. You can adjust this period by changing the value of the “Ends By” field. You can then select a time (or a day and time if appropriate) for the refresh to occur. Finally, any errors will be sent to the email address that you specify in the notification field.

That’s really all there is to it. Selecting “save settings” will save the schedule, and “save and refresh report” will save the schedule, and attempt to run an immediate refresh.

If the data source is cloud based, it will be queried directly by Power BI, and if it is on premises, it will contact the appropriate Data Management Gateway process and refresh through it. I would love for there to be a little more status information for refreshes in the administration portal, but for now, the refresh will either succeed or fail. However, If the data source is on premises, you can open the Resource Monitor on the gateway machine, and monitor the “diawp.exe” process.

Once the refresh kicks in you’ll notice it using a lot of send bandwidth.

Selecting the “history” tab will of course show the refresh history, and what the refresh schedule for the workbook is. At a glance you can see whether or not refreshes succeeded or failed, how long they took, and how they were initiated.

~~I should note here that I have been working with the Power BI preview for several months now, and in order to get scheduled refresh to work with on premises data, I did need to install the latest~~ ~~Data Management Gateway. I’m not sure if this was because scheduled refresh required it, or just because it had expired (it had), but I would recommend installing it in any case.~~ Update 10/02/14 – I have been informed that scheduled refresh does not require the latest data management gateway, but I would recommend getting it all the same – it’s the release version.

One interesting side note. After installing the latest DMG, accessing its configuration shows its version to be 1.0, where previous versions were all point releases (the latest being 0.11). I can’t help but assume that the General Availability of Power BI isn’t far away. UPDATE 10/02/14 – In fact, Power BI went GA today, and this is in fact the GA version of the Data Management Gateway.

Limitations

There are a number of behaviours and limitations that you should be aware of when using scheduled refresh in Power BI. The below items are by no means exhaustive, but simply things that I have either run into, or been made aware of.

Too much data

As I have outlined previously, the maximum size for an embedded workbook model in Power BI is 250 MB. If a user attempts to enable a larger model, they will receive an error message. However, scheduled refresh now allows for the possibility that the model could start small, and then grow to exceed this limit through refresh. What then happens when the limit is exceeded?

When the model is opened for refresh, its size is checked. If it’s OK, the refresh proceeds, and the model is updated. If the model now exceeds the limits, the next refresh will fail, as will any attempts to work with the file through a browser, until the size of the model is reduced.

Collisions

Refreshes can take a fair amount of time. During this period, the file is not checked out exclusively to the refresh process, and if it is edited by a user in that time an edit collision could occur. If this situation arises, scheduled refresh will simply discard its updates and fail.

Frequency

As mentioned above, the two options for schedule frequency are daily and weekly. I was really hoping to see hourly. Monthly and annually would be great too. As it stands, if your data needs to be more current than daily, then Power BI still won’t work for you (without heavy customization). Of course, the reality is that daily is frequent enough for most situations, and this at least puts data refresh on par with its counterpart in PowerPivot for SharePoint.

If someone from the product team is reading this, hourly updates would be my #2 feature ask, for both Power BI and Power Pivot for SharePoint. (for the #1 ask, read on).

Limited Data Sources

At the moment, the refreshable data sources are those that are currently supported by Office 365 in the cloud (Azure SQL, SQL on Azure VMs, and OData feeds with simple or no authentication), and those supported by the Data Management Gateway (SQL Server 205 +, Oracle 10g +). A full list can be found in the official documentation here.

This is a great starting list, but it is limited. There are quite a number of other data sources that would be great to see on this list, multidimensional sources being right up there. However to my thinking, the most glaring omission on this list is Power Query.

The above data sources are supported if the data was imported into the model through Power Pivot’s import feature (or the native features in Excel 2013). However, if a user takes advantage of the many excellent features available in Power Query, their model will not be automatically refreshable. I have already seen in the preview forums that this difference confuses users, and given that Power Query is a highly touted integral component of Power BI, it needs to become a first class citizen, and soon. That’s my #1 ask – again, both for Power BI and Power Pivot for SharePoint.

However, for the moment, what you need to know is that if your model is built with Power Query, it can’t be refreshed automatically.

Limitations aside, it appears to me that Power BI is an absolutely compelling value proposition, and the inclusion of scheduled refresh completes the picture. I can’t wait for it to be released into the wild. Let the games begin!

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