In Power BI development in Microsoft Fabric, understanding and utilising source control mechanisms is crucial for efficient collaboration and version management. This blog post delves into the essential aspects of source control for Power BI. This blog also includes the recording of my session at Saudi Arabia’s Excel User Group on the 26th of August 2023. The event was organised by Microsoft MVP, Faraz Sheik, where we walked through all the topics discussed in this blog.
Understanding Source Control
At its core, source control is a system that records changes to a file or set of files over time. This lets developers recall specific versions later, ensuring efficient collaboration and error management. It’s particularly vital for development teams, allowing multiple contributors to work on the same codebase without overwriting each other’s work.
For Power BI developers, this means tracking changes made to reports, and data models that are the most crucial components of every Power BI project.
This is the second part of the series of blog posts showing how to integrate Power BI with Azure DevOps, a cloud platform for software development. The previous post gave a brief history of source control systems, which help developers manage code changes. It also explained what Git is, a fast and flexible distributed source control system, and why it is useful. It introduced the initial configurations required in Azure DevOps and explained how to integrate Power BI (Fabric) Service with Azure DevOps.
This blog post explains how to synchronise an Azure DevOps repository with your local machine to integrate your Power BI Projects with Azure DevOps. Before we start, we need to know what a Power BI Project is and how we can create it.
What is Power BI Project (Developer Mode)
Power BI Project (*.PBIP) is a new file format for Power BI Desktop that was announced in May 2023 and made available for public preview in June 2023. It allows us to save our work as a project, which consists of a folder structure containing individual text files that define the report and dataset artefacts. This enables us to use source control systems, such as Git, to track changes, compare revisions, resolve conflicts, and review changes. It also enables us to use text editors, such as Visual Studio Code, to edit the artefact definitions more productively and programmatically. Additionally, it supports CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery), where we submit changes to a series of quality gates before applying them to the production system.
PBIP files differ from the regular Power BI Desktop files (PBIX), which store the report and dataset artefacts as a single binary file. This made integrating with source control systems, text editors, and CI/CD systems difficult. PBIP aims to overcome these limitations and provide a more developer-friendly experience for Power BI Desktop users.
Since this feature is still in public preview when writing this blog post, we have to enable it from the Power BI Desktop Options and Settings.
Enable Power BI Project (Developer Mode) (Currently in Preview)
As mentioned, we first need to enable the Power BI Project (Developer Mode) feature, introduced for public preview in the June 2023 release of Power BI Desktop. Power BI Project files allow us to save our Power BI files as *.PBIP files deconstruct the legacy Power BI report files (*.PBIX) into well-organised folders and files. With this feature, we can:
Edit individual components of our Power BI file, such as data sources, queries, data model, visuals, etc.
Use any text editor or IDE to edit our Power BI file
Compare and merge changes
Collaborate with other developers on the same Power BI file
To enable Power BI Project (Developer Mode), follow these steps in Power BI Desktop:
