Power BI

You typically start the content lifecycle by performing BI solution planning. You gather requirements to understand and define the problem that your solution should address, and arrive at a solution design. During this planning and design stage, you make key decisions to prepare for the later stages.

Which item types do you expect to create, and how many of each? For instance, will you create data items like dataflows or semantic models, reporting items like reports or dashboards, or a combination of both? How is the content delivered to content consumers? For instance, will consumers use data items to build their own content, will they only view centralized reports, or a combination of both? How complex is the content? For instance, is it a small prototype, or a large semantic model that encompasses multiple business processes? Do you expect the scale, scope, and complexity of the content to grow over time? For instance, will the content encompass other regions or business areas in the future? How long do you expect the business to need this content? For instance, will this content support a key initiative of the business that has a finite timeline?

Patterns can also be specific to reports. These are usually a collection of different elements and properties on a report that don’t necessarily come from a data model, or are specific to a reporting requirement. Consider the following example of a simple pattern for a left-hand title area on a report, which you can copy and re-use modularly across multiple report templates.

al if you have fixed styles or functionalities that apply to many reports (like a centralized portal that you link to from a help button).

The card visual formatting, which is a set of properties for the visual container and elements to look the way they do. This might be saved as a theme.json file, or applied with the Format painter tool in Power BI Desktop from an existing visual template. You then combine one or more visuals together in a single report page to fully cover the necessary questions the user might have about their data.

Report page templates are designed to address a set of specific questions or data needs

However, there are limited options to apply these visuals in new reports as templates. For instance, you can apply container formatting (such as for backgrounds, titles, and so on) with either the format painter or Power BI theme.json files. However, it is only possible to replace fields from your template visual if you use on-object interaction. An example of this is shown below, where a visual template results in a “grey box of death” because the MTD Sales field cannot be found. The user can select an alternative field, like Sales Amount or Sales CY – PY to swap, and retain the visual formatting (to thus use the template).

Using Semantic-Link-Labs to build the solution The good news is that Michael Kovalsky from elegantbi.com has created the Semantic-Link-Labs which allows this to be achieved using a Notebook. I first installed the Semantic-Link-Labs