ArcGIS for Power BI doesn’t support geocoded locations when publishing to the web

Question

ArcGIS for Power BI doesn’t support geocoded locations when publishing to the  web, i.e. it only works when you provide the latitude and longitude.

This rules out any kind of area map.

We have found the following information:

We have been told that this is a known issue and the Esri product team in the US have it on their roadmap for 2021. As we are now in Q3 of 2021 does anyone know if this issue will be resolved soon please?

With thanks.

Anonymous User · Answer

Hi Elaine,

You could to the data join in Pro, combining the non-spatial table with spatial features, or you can use ArcGIS for Office to match the data to boundaries there and publish that as a service. Once you've performed the join of choice, you can export the data as JSON, load it into Power BI, and use the Geometry column in the location field well when the new version is released.

We're being told now that it may not release until October 6th but hoping for sooner.

ElaineBennett · Answer

Thanks Andrew,

I will share this information with  our Power BI team and keep an eye out for the Sept update.

When you say "If you are boundary matching your data, so wanting to display polygons instead of points, you can do so again before you load your data into Power BI" please can you let me know if you are suggesting we use a "reference layer" served from ArcGIS Enterprise or AGOL to show the results or is there another way?

Thanks again, Elaine

Anonymous User · Answer

Hi @ElaineBennett

There are a few workflows to support addresses in your data when you want to publish to web, and there is no plan to support direct address matching in Power BI for Publish to Web.

The best way to handle this is to geocode your data before you load it into Power BI. By Geocoding the data before you load it in, you will obtain an X,Y value that can be used to display the data on the map. This will also allow you to display more data with faster performance.

If you are boundary matching your data, so wanting to display polygons instead of points, you can do so again before you load your data into Power BI. In the update due out on the September 29th, we will support geometry stored in Power BI. We will blog more on the details of this, as it will take some data engineering to calculate and store the geometry so it can be loaded into Power BI.

My go to tool to get X,Y or boundary matched geometry is ArcGIS for Office. You can geocode the records and export the data with X,Y values in just a few clicks.

Thank you,

Andrew