The Automapping process in powerBI

Question

heyy guyss!!

I'm currently pulling in tables into powerBi and I would like them to AutoMap to the corresponding IDs. e.g. Date_ID in one table to map to the Date_ID in another table. I've noticed that sometimes the automapping doesn't occur even if the columns have the same name, while other times it does. Can anyone shed some light on how this automapping process works?

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

Microsoft doesn't provide the clearest documentation on the autodetect of relationships. It has been improving over the years. It used to be so bad, many developers would go into the settings and turn off autodetect for relationships. We would then manually create them. In general, it's a good practice to investigate every relationship for cardinality, and filter direction of data.

Here's Microsoft's documentation.

Answer 2

One other option to consider for this is Tabular Editor. Their Advanced Scripting feature can be used for lots of different things of this nature.

The Useful Script Snippets page of their docs actually includes a demo of how to setup a script to handle Auto-creating relationships based on something like a naming convention specific to your org. This can be adapted to your use case, but beyond the fact that it is much more customizable than what is available in PBI Desktop, it should also be much more reliable.