Tag: Custom Visual

Setting up the formatting options turns out to be the most fiddly bit of developing a custom visual. There are a few “special” property names that are required to trigger some behaviours, undocumented features and at least one bug that I’ve come across. In this section I’ll explain how the options are set up for the Tree Funnel visual and in an extra post I’ll talk about some of the other issues and features. Continue reading “Power BI Custom Visual Part 5 – Formatting”

In understanding how to access the data in a custom visual I found AB Kimmel’s tutorial incredibly helpful. Here I’m just going to go through the options I need, for a broader explanation I’d recommend reading his sections on data views. There are four steps to go through. First specify what data can be added to the visual via the Fields pane – this data will then be accessible via the dataview. Then create a data model to hold this data and a function to populate it from the dataview. And finally use the data model data to draw the visual. Continue reading “Power BI Custom Visual Part 4 – Accessing the DataView”

In this section I’m going to create a new power BI custom visual that will display the Tree Funnel chart I designed in Part 2. For now, it will just use the fixed test data. I won’t bind it to an actual Power BI data source till the next instalment. Continue reading “Power BI Custom Visual Part 3 – Moving D3 to Power BI”

When drawing the paths for the Tree Funnel visual I noticed an unsightly line between each horizontal. Initially I thought this would be due to a small error in the stroke width introducing a gap but actually the calculation is perfect and each path is exactly adjacent. The lines are actually due to the anti-aliasing of each path. Continue reading “Power BI Custom Visual Part 2A – SVG blend lines between elements”

Power BI Visuals basically render a bunch of HTML to display a chart. Typically these will be SVG elements and most likely use the D3 library to help draw them. So when I started on developing a Power BI Custom Visual it made sense to develop the chart rendering separately and worry about how to hook it into the Power BI Visual after I was happy with the basic chart logic. This section then is purely D3. Continue reading “Power BI Custom Visual Part 2 – Creating a Tree Funnel Chart”

I’d been interested in developing a Power BI custom visual for a while before actually getting round to producing something. The usual constraints on time were one reason but also the rather limited documentation and the number of components required which I have at best a surface knowledge of: Typescript and D3 in particular. Having finally found the time I found that the process was not too painful even starting from a pretty low base. The documentation however was sparse and so before detailing how I got on I thought I’d outline the resources I found useful. Continue reading “Power BI Custom Visuals Part 1 – Introduction”