Basic Power BI Questions from a newbi

[MichaelRudden1]

Hi,

I think ArcGIS for Maps for Power BI has great potential. I work for an organisation that produces many dashboards and this added capability is a welcome addition.  I've just started looking at it today so have a couple of questions:

1. I've added some locations to my map directly from a SQL Server database. For selections I can use either the select individual locations tool or the select multiple locations tool but I cannot use the 'Select locations using an area' tool. Reading the help it looks like this tool would only be enabled if I'd added a reference layer.  I just don't get that?  If you are allowing a me to select multiple locations based on an area (polygon), I don't get why I could not select them based on a polygon that i digitised myself.  Assuming I'm not doing something wrong, are there any plans to support this in the future?

2. I've selected some points.   What I would like to be able to do is to display my selection results in a power BI table control.  Is that possible?  If not, is that on the road map please?

Thanks

Mike

[YoavRappaport]

Mike:

1. I don't know the why, but I do know the how. You can only select using a reference layer and it can only be a polygon. The reference layer must be publicly accessible layer on AGOL. I wish they would change that so that we can have our own layers hidden from the public, however as long as you can/allowed to publish it publicly you can make it devoid of any attributes (just your own unique ID) and then tie the rest of the data to it from your internal source tables. Essentially the layer is virtually useless for anyone else without any attributes.

2. Points are brought in using XY location and a unique ID from any source. You can then tie to that any set of attributes you'd like and display it in any kind of visual, including a table or matrix. You just need to join the two tables based on the ID, or have all the attributes in your location table. The join is accomplished in the "relationships" tab in power bi desktop (on the far left side bar).

[MichaelRudden1]

Hi Yoav,

Thanks for your reply.

On 1. I do not want to create a feature service, so would really appreciate if this functionality was available for point layers created on the fly directly from lat/long fields in a database. I'm now guessing it isn't supported because the layer doesn't have an Object ID column. Please could someone from Esri confirm?

On 2. Yes you are quire right. Working fine now

Thanks

Mike

[ScottBall]

Hey Michael - apologies for the long delay in reply. Notifications for new activity weren't coming to my inbox, but that's fixed now. 

Anyways, for point 1 - can you describe what you'd like to do in a bit more detail? Are you wanting to free-hand draw your own selection area on the map (instead of being limited to the rectangle-select like you currently are)? I just want to make sure I fully understand what you're trying to do.