I’ve been testing the PowerBI Connector and have developed several use cases for my upcoming presentation at BiLT in Riga. An additional thought I was testing was visualizing or switching between design options. My strategy was to upload two models to a Speckle project and import each one into a session of PowerBI, however it only appears to import the data from the main model regardless of which Model URL I provide.
Is this a known limitation?
I thought of a workaround by combining them into a single model in the Speckle app, however this is not possible as some elements have the same GUIDs in my Revit model, and it would be impractical to change this.
All models in a Speckle project can be received and visualized as long as project is set as Link Shareable. So to answer your question, no, all models are support in Power BI connector.
I’d be happy to help you if you can share the Speckle Model URL.
What you can do is receive multiple models into a single Power BI document. Merge them into a single query and filter them by their Model Name (ID or some other parameter you define). Happy to help with a POC to demonstrate this.
I’ve created a new project (link shareable as before) with two branches - main and option a, the models are visibly different when viewed in the Speckle web app. I’ve loaded the data into two separate visuals from the different queries. Even though the visuals are using separate queries / data sources, they are showing the same ‘main’ model.
I’m happy for you to demonstrate where I’m going wrong, but something doesn’t look right.
p.s. I originally pasted URLs and images however the forum wouldn’t allow me to post them as a new user, nor can I upload my pbix file.
Another issue I experienced is that if the ‘main’ branch is populated with geometry after another model has been added, the PowerBI Connector won’t import any of the data reporting that the main branch has no commits.
Hey @KevinFielding, welcome to the community. I’m also preparing material for my BILT lab, so I’m happy to help a fellow traveller.
Or at least explain limitations.
The 3D viewer in PowerBI is not limited to just a main model, but it is currently limited to displaying a single model. We are working on changing this limitation to work similarly to some of the dynamic multi-model federations we have with the new web application. Sadly, the viewer hasn’t implemented these yet.
That said, retrieving two models into the data connector as design options can be possible and then addressing only one at a time in the 3D visual.
Apologies for this. We have experienced a bump in new users’ spam; we are tweaking the settings to try not to be too inconvenient.
Both are version 2.18 and URLs are taken from app.speckle.systems
The issue appears to be with the connector and not the visual. I’ve transformed the model data and extracted the rooms and the total counts for both imported models match the main model. I can confirm that the URLs match the models in the web app.
With regards to functionality, displaying only one model at a time isn’t an issue for me as I would be looking to toggle between options anyway.
Sorry to hear you are having “The branch ‘main’ in stream 6b5e89387c has no commits” error. We have seen this error being reported previously. They were using speckle.xyz (our old web app) and upgrading to app.speckle.systems (new web app) solved it for them.
Possibly you have multiple Power BI Desktop folder, possibly in One Drive and Power BI picks that one instead of the other (the one under Documents), or the other way around. You can try the steps described here:
@gokermu good guess, that’s exactly what the issue was.
We have OneDrive for Business set up to sync Desktop and Document folders, and as a result there are two Document folders within my user profile. I simply moved the speckle.pqx file from
%userprofile%\Documents\Power BI Desktop\Custom Connectors\
to
%OneDriveCommercial%\Documents\Power BI Desktop\Custom Connectors\
see you at BiLT Kevin!