Category: No code solutions

Show last refreshed time for your Power BI Reports in Import Mode – Quick Tip

Hi Folks,

If you are working on Power BI, this is a good to know tip.

In case you were using Import mode which is by default suggested by Microsoft for medium or small-scale datasets as it uses Vertipaq engine for improved performance and compression, this post is definitely for you.

Did your user ever asked why they were not able to see latest data in the report. Possibly you could have said it is because of refresh frequency.

Then you could have thought if there was a nice way to show when the dataset was last refreshed. This definitely help your users to have a clear idea of what’s going on.

FYI, the refresh frequency could be set in Power BI service as below for import mode.

In your Power BI report, click on Transform data.

Click on New Source –> Blank Query as below.

In the Query Fx expression…. enter the below expression to get the last refresh time and click on Tick symbol.

Next, click on To Table to create a table from this data as below.

Rename it to something meaningful like below.

Rename the Query1 variable as below..you should see the applied steps getting added for each operation you performed.

DateTime.LocalNow() gets the last refresh frequency of your dataset in your local time.

Click on Close & Apply…

Now in your report, just add a card visual at the bottom right corner and drag the Last Refreshed On query.

That’s it, next time onwards, you should see the date and time when the refresh had occurred.

Cheers,

PMDY

Update your Model Driven App User personal settings in an easier way – Quick Tip

Hi Folks,

Did u ever been asked in your project to update the User Personal Settings….possibly you could have resorted to User Settings Utility in XrmToolBox…may be you could have updated the settings manually for each user in list provided to you…

Do you know you could update them in bulk at one shot in a much easier way, so you don’t need to update it manually one by one. I could see many blog posts talking about updating through this tool, but this was missed in those.

Scenario:

You have newly added users to your Azure Active Directory, now you need to set up the user personal settings for them so see proper time zone in Dynamics.

There were two ways:

  1. Use a view
  2. Choose users from FXB(Fetch XML Builder)

The first approach is easiest of course…

For this, lets create a view Users with Security in user entity as below…you know that you could only update settings for those who were having security role.

Mainly the user need prvReadUserSettings privilege to update the personal settings, the tool doesn’t allow if not.

Once you have connected to the environment, click on Load Users and settings. Now just select the view which have created before…upon selecting the tool will list down all the active users satisfying the view criteria.

All you need is to click on Check all and there by selecting all the users satisfying your filter criteria, change the settings as per your needs on the right-hand side of the tool and click on Update User(s) Settings in one go.

Here I have 3 users in the view, all were updated in one shot…

Isn’t it easy, this trick will save you a lot of time if your user list grows…

Cheers,

PMDY