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

Stop using OData V2.0 endpoint going further for your implementations….!

Hi Folks,

This blog is just to let you know why you should stop implementing OData calls using V2.0 version. I am pretty sure almost every Dynamics CE project out there have used this OData calls definitely in their implementations from quite some time. While some of new implementations have replaced the logic using Web API, still some people go with using OData V2.0 calls to build their functionality using JavaScript.

Microsoft had actually planned to remove this endpoint from April 30, 2023. But they deferred this because many projects are’nt yet prepared for removal of this end point and help the customers prepare for this transition to Web API end point.

Identify if you still using OData V2.0 end point, actually Organization Data Service is an OData V2.0 endpoint which was introduced with Dynamics CRM 2011..it’s deprecated way back with Dynamics 365 CE version 8.0.

So now, how to identify where and all you were using OData End Points in your code…you shouldn’t expect that existing code will work with only minor changes and this work can be taken at a later stage. This was a high priority warning message from Microsoft stating the removal, so I urge all of you to be prepared for this removal very soon and you shouldn’t be surprised.

So where to change…..?

Below are the places where you should change your way of implementation and align with Microsoft…

  1. The Organization Data Service using this end point /XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc in Javascript, you can find it out with the help of the checker service rule web-avoid-crm2011-service-odata for identification. This can be code which was making OData calls to perform CRUD Operations on the current table or related table.
  2. Check any other code, including PowerShell scripts, that send requests to this endpoint: /xrmservices/2011/organizationdata.svc.
  3. Cross Check your Power BI reports or Excel Data sources that may be using this endpoint.

Note:

This announcement does not involve the deprecated Organization Service SOAP endpoint, meaning using Organization service in plugins. At this time, no date has been announced for the removal of that endpoint. At the time of writing this blog post, Microsoft didn’t announce whether this removal is only for Online or On Premise Versions.

References:

How to use Application Insights to identify usage of the OrganizationData.svc endpoint?

OData v2.0 Service removal date announcement

The Clock is Ticking on Your Endpoint

Do not use the OData v2.0 endpoint

Hope this saves time and effort implementing your Dynamics CE Solutions…

Cheers,

PMDY